Sylvia Plimack Mangold
1938–
Although its subject appears ordinary-a section of floor and wall in a room-Sylvia Plimack Mangold's Floor with Horizontal Mirror effects a canny play on the conventions of representation and the mechanics of vision. In depicting not only an expanse of wood flooring but its reflection in a mirror propped up against the wall, the artist stages a perspectival conundrum: the mirror at once creates a sense of depth and directs our attention to the surface of the picture plane. "I want the viewer to ... enter the painting, and then come back to the surface," she has stated. The mirror also makes a literal pun on the idea of a painting being a window onto the world, and asserts Mangold's photorealistic abilities: every color shift and striation in the wood flooring's strips has been faithfully recorded, appearing just as they do in the mirror.
After studying at the Cooper Union and Yale University, Mangold first experimented with Cubist-like modes of painting, arriving at her signature theme in the mid-1960s: the floors, corners, baseboards, wainscoting, and walls of her New York apartment and studio. Often, these works incorporated trompe l’oeil images of masking tape and rulers, which self-reflexively referenced both her painting process and the confines of the work. In 1971 Mangold and her family moved to upstate New York, and most of the paintings, drawings, and prints she has produced since that time are landscapes featuring the trees around their home.
Introduction
Sylvia Plimack Mangold (born 1938) is an American artist, painter, printmaker, and pastelist. She is known for her representational depictions of interiors and landscapes.
Wikidata identifier
Q7660986
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 22, 2025.
Roles
Artist, painter
ULAN identifier
500006404
Names
Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Sylvia Mangold
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 22, 2025.
