The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Announces Exhibition: “Martha Diamond: Deep Time”
# Martha Diamond: A Masterful Journey Through Time and Space in Painting
Martha Diamond’s art encapsulates the spirit of contemporary American painting—achingly alive yet grounded in the meticulous study of form, emotion, and urban architecture. For over five decades, Diamond’s work has oscillated impressively between abstraction and representation, demonstrating her inimitable handling of gesture and space. She invites viewers into a carefully layered process of artistic inquiry, where built environments fuse with psychological landscapes, and time itself seems palpable on the canvas.
Diamond’s ability to balance formal concision with painterly bravado places her squarely among the most perceptive American painters of the last half-century. Her latest exhibition, *Martha Diamond: Deep Time*, on view at **The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum** in Ridgefield, Connecticut, until May 18, 2025, offers an intimate dive into her career and exemplifies the complexity and sophistication that define her distinguished body of work.
## Reimagining Landscape Tradition Through “Deep Time”
The theme of “deep time” offers a compelling lens through which to view Diamond’s work. Deep time, a concept borrowed from geology, refers to the vastness of earth’s history, stretching beyond human comprehension. Applied to Diamond’s painting practice, it speaks to her insistence on the simultaneous existence of multiple temporalities—from the fleetingness of an urban scene to the millennia-old rhythms that shape human-made structures over time.
In this sense, Diamond’s paintings are particularly attuned to the tension between permanence and transience that pervades urban spaces. Her depictions of cityscapes—specifically her native New York City—capture not only the materiality of architecture but also its fluid, living essence. The exhibition draws from a range of works that represent her different stylistic periods, pulling visitors into the minute shifts in her approach, showing her allegiance to both intuition and structure.
Among the pieces on display are her rarely seen “single-picture” compositions from the 1970s that document early signs of her fascination with space and angularity. As her work evolved, so did her relationship to her surroundings. Her towering, almost vertiginous images of New York City, painted during the 1980s to the early 2000s, convey a palpable sense of energy and movement, juxtaposed with the impossible density of urban architecture. The later canvases, which tease or even embrace more vivid shades of abstraction, are exciting examples of her mature approach—looser perhaps, but no less intricate in their design.
## The Aldrich Exhibition: A Career Spanning Generations
Curated by **The Aldrich’s Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart** in collaboration with **Levi Prombaum**, Consulting Curator at the Colby College Museum of Art, the exhibition balances the architectural with the emotive. It underscores Diamond’s unwavering commitment to those hybrid, intertwined spheres that define her artistic journey: the physical and the introspective, the realistic and the abstract.
The show is particularly notable for featuring pieces from Diamond’s Lower Manhattan studio, a location she occupied for more than five decades. The studio itself reflects Diamond’s deep attachment to the urban architectures she painted—sketched, sometimes keenly observed from above, sometimes rendered as abstract geometries or fractured illusions of space.
In showcasing a broad spectrum of her work—including paintings, works on paper, and experimental monotypes—the exhibition constructs a visual history of how her art transformed from architectural studies into deeply felt inquiries into abstraction. Viewers engage with a process marked by observation yet fueled by a sense of abstraction that transcends precision, opening up avenues for the viewer’s own interpretations and emotional responses.
## Spirit and Experimentation Meet Architecture
What makes Diamond’s oeuvre particularly compelling is her approach to experimenting with forms while retaining an emotional connection with architecture. Her simple yet expressive gestures—the loose contour of a building’s facade, for instance—can evoke not just the structure’s physical presence, but also the character of the space it inhabits, the history it holds, and the emotions it evokes in the viewer. Her New York City works blend the recognizable features of skyscrapers with abstract planes, transforming the city from mere built environment into a living, breathing entity.
Her ability to transition so fluidly between abstraction and representation is one of the hallmarks of her work. This fluidity is not just a shift in style but reflects Diamond’s deep commitment to seeing space, form, and time as deeply interconnected. In this way, “deep time” becomes an apt metaphor not only for her thematic concerns but also for her method of painting, where careful observation and gesture produce layered, multifaceted depictions of the world.
## Accompanying Monograph: Deep Insights into Martha Diamond’s World
In addition to the exhibition, *Martha Diamond: Deep Time* is accompanied by her **first major monograph**, offering an in-depth examination of her artistic journey and philosophy. This comprehensive catalogue is richly