Exhibition Review: “Deep Time” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

There’s a great brand of TikTok that blends the studio visit with the striptease. The “painting reveal” video begins with the shy artist holding a painting turned away from the camera, which is already pretty weird, as a text overlay describes the dire economic or emotional circumstances that led to the creation of the work. Slowly, they turn the canvas like a dealt card, with a facial expression that is proud yet fragile. The best offerings in this genre are the young men who reveal their work to be knock-offs of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). These are so common that they’ve led to the sub-genre “painting reveal except not a man copying Basquiat.”

How great would it be if they all started knocking off Martha Diamond (1944-2023) instead? Basquiat’s contemporary is currently the subject of a retrospective, “Deep Time” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. This suburban collection of paintings, works on paper and monotypes from across 45 years, some of them rarely seen, show the artist’s ability to depict the haunting power of the city. Diamond is often grouped with Neo-Expressionists like Basquiat, but she shunned the idea that her paintings were about emotion as she was “more concerned with a vision.”

That vision is usually of New York City, which is why I might like to see these coy Sunday painters try their hands at emulating her work. High-C (1982) is the kind of urban masterpiece that could only be captured by someone who has been halted at the window as they notice the intensity of sunlight, how it causes the skyscraper outside to appear even grander and more menacing than before. Its yellow cannot be found in nature and would destroy anyone ill-equipped for directness.

Contrast this with Cityscape with Blue Shadow (1994), in which the building appears to melt into its shadow. This otherworldly blue looks like it might drip on the pedestrians below, and yet it’s hard to think about humans when you regard these works. The buildings have character enough on their own and will be there long after us. Diamond seems to imply they were almost there before us, too, hence “deep time,” a term from the Enlightenment and geology.

SEE ALSO: A Spellbinding Retrospective Showcases Artist and Jazz Witch Gertrude Abercrombie’s Singular Vision

But isn’t all buildings. Untitled (1973) is among her earliest mature works and sees her collecting almost every kind of line into a dense and multicolored forest. At the time, she was very inspired by Chinese brush painting. Carriage (1990) is a remarkable blue apparition floating in a pink-red horizon. Though could I be wrong in still reading the city into that one? The excellent catalogue collects writings from Diamond’s poet pals, and these really are the only people I trust to interpret her. “’I don’t like to appear cosmic in public,’ says Martha Diamond,” the painter’s friend Eileen Myles wrote in 1990. “Well, who would?”

“Martha Diamond: Deep Time” is on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through May 18, 2025.