The exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery entitled Skin of the City runs through April 27 and features works (including many studies) that were made between 1980 and 2000. The opening reception was accompanied by a panel discussion which brought together the Guggenheim Museum’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Katherine Brinson, the Robert Soros Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum (and co-curator of the Made in LA biennial), Paulina Pobocha, the Director of the Martha Diamond Trust, Olivia Funk, and artist Mary Weatherford. The four spoke about Diamond’s influences, outlooks, and the rigorous methodologies which went into the outlines of her paintings.
Diamond would collage magazine clippings of building details into what she called “atlases.” These source references served as portfolio-like dioramas of how she envisioned the world of a painting, and from that an oil and board study would emerge. Diamond rejected an association with neo-expressionism.
"I’m more concerned with a vision than expressionism and I try to paint that vision realistically," she once stated. "I try to paint my perceptions rather than paint through emotion. A familiar subject in a radically generalized or edited treatment is a formalist device I use, so that recognizability or familiarity leads the viewer to look for expected details. For the most part, the details are not there, so they look harder at the paint than the painting. You begin to distinguish between paint performance, image, idea, expectation, and you."