Collections: Contemporary Art: The Inversion

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The Inversion

Sylvia Plimack Mangold's The Inversion is full of polarities: images compete with a void, geometry conflicts with nature, traditional landscape painting faces off against abstraction. The artist began The Inversion as a larger work, and it forms a narrative about the painting process: "The landscape originally stretched horizontally from left to right, side to side," she wrote. "I cropped it because it didn't work—the negation of some areas becomes a positive element in the support of the total picture." In other words, the void at the right is a kind of negative "inversion" of the positive landscape.


• Artist: Sylvia Plimack Mangold, American, born 1938
• Medium: Oil on linen
• Dates: 1984
• Dimensions: 60 x 100 in. (152.4 x 254 cm)
• Signature: Top right of center: "S. P. M. 1984"
• Collections: Contemporary Art
• Museum Location: This item is not on view
• Accession Number: 86.200
• Credit Line: Gift of Henry, Cheryl, Daniel, Michael, and Willie Welt in memory of Abraham Joseph Welt
• Copyright: © Sylvia Plimack Mangold
• Image: Overall, 86.200_bw.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph
Sylvia Plimack Mangold (American, born 1938). The Inversion, 1984. Oil on linen, 60 x 100 in. (152.4 x 254 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Henry, Cheryl, Daniel, Michael, and Willie Welt in memory of Abraham Joseph Welt, 86.200 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 86.200_bw.jpg)