Sylvia Plimack Mangold (b. 1938)
A September Passage, 1984
Oil on linen
60 x 90 inches
Sylvia Plimack Mangold (b. 1938, New York) is known for her representational paintings of interiors and landscapes. Plimack Mangold considered her meticulous renderings of floors, light, and space, painted from the mid-1960s through mid-70s, to be autobiographical. They create a plane in space that invites the viewer into her studio and explores themes of reflection and transparency. Plimack Mangold’s cropped viewpoint calls attention to the act of looking, taking perception itself as her subject. In 1971, Plimack Mangold moved out of the city and the new natural environment marked a significant shift in her subject matter as she turned her attention to landscape painting.
Plimack Mangold’s practice has relied extensively on her immediate environment as a source of inspiration, giving expression to the intimate reality of her experience. Her desire to recreate space as she observes it gives form to the intangible, lending the space of her paintings a sculptural quality. The viewer enters a visual space in process seeing as Plimack Mangold did as she worked directly from her subject.
In 1968, one of Plimack Mangold’s early floor paintings was included in Realism Now, an exhibition critical in recognizing the resurgence of realism in contemporary art, co-organized by Linda Nochlin, Mary Delahoyd, and Vassar art history students. Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, organized a retrospective in 1994 curated by Cheryl Brutvan. The exhibition traveled to Wadsworth Atheneum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Blaffer Art Museum at University of Houston. Her paintings are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of the Arts, Michigan; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston, Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tape, 1975-1986, January 17–March 7, 2026.
Craig Starr Gallery, New York, Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975-84, October 24–March 8, 2024.
Gallery 125 Newbury, New York, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, April 14–June 3, 2023.
Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston, Sylvia Plimack Mangold: The Pin Oak, 1985-2015, January 17–March 18, 2021.
Brooke Alexander, New York, Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Winter Trees, March 22–April 21, 2018.
Selected Group Exhibitions
125 Newbury, New York, CHAIR SHOW, April 17–May 23, 2026.
Campus, Hudson, New York, Inaugural Exhibition, June 28–October 27, 2025.
TOTAH, New York, This Must Be the Place, June 19–August 16, 2024.
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, June 6, 2022–January 8, 2023.
Karma Gallery, New York, Painting in New York 1971–83, September 21–November 5, 2022.
Selected Publications
Helen Molesworth. Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975-84. New York: Craig Starr Gallery, 2024.
Antin, Eleanor, and Gavin Delahunty. On Hannah Arendt: Between Past and Future. London: Richard Saltoun, 2023.
52 Artist: A Feminist Milestone. Ridgefield: Connecticut: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2022.
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2021.
Schwabsky, Barry. Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism. New York: D.A.P., 2019.
