05/14/2026 General, Modern & Contemporary Art
NEW YORK, NY -- Sylvia Plimack Mangold's Untitled (Study for Big Green), 1977 is assumed to be a study for the 1977 painting by the same name, held in the private collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. This study reflects the introduction of landscapes to Plimack Mangold’s subjects. Additionally, the study, as well as the realized painting Big Green also features the trompe l’oeil masking tape that the artist would employ in many of her most successful works.
Having left New York City along with her husband, the Minimalist painter Robert Mangold in 1971, the couple resettled upstate, following in the footsteps of so many painters seeking inspiration in the romantic luminescence of the Hudson Valley. As artists like Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Cole and many others before her, Plimack Mangold delved deeply into documenting the nature surrounding her. Yet, new concepts, such as those being explored by friends and peers like Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse, remained relevant and necessary. Plimack Mangold may have embraced the landscape, though her devotion to challenging the limits of the picture plane allowed her work to exist within its own dimension.
While painted masking tape began to appear in Plimack Mangold’s work several years prior to Untitled (Study for Big Green), its juxtaposition against a landscape in this image provides further weight. The masking tape is not trompe l’oeil simply in depiction, but also in texture – paint is layered and modeled to approximate the crisp, hard edge of the tape strip, the matte roughness of its surface. And while the masking tape images may have served as more of a focal point in earlier, more minimal works, it is a mistake to see the tape here as simply an ad-hoc framing of the landscape. The tape holds a purpose beyond simply defining a borderline between the abstract and the representational.
The title Big Green lends itself to the inherent mystery of the work: does Big Green refer to the expanse of lawn in the landscape? Or to the color field of green that alludes to the wall of a home? Or is the green surrounding the masking taped window pane not a wall at all, but a remnant of Minimalist abstraction? The confounding joy of Plimack Mangold’s work is that it is almost never either/or, but very often both/and. The paradox is the point, seemingly, as we, the viewer must consider a real landscape floating within an undefined space framed by an illusory representation of an artist’s common tool; masking tape. The flatness of Minimalism exists in Untitled (Study for Big Green) within the same space as the conventional three-dimensional landscape, forcing two diametrically opposed approaches to painting to find balance within a single picture plane. By challenging the viewer to conceive of these disharmonious elements together within a single space, it is a reminder that painting, both the process and the history, is not a finished product.
Auction Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 11am
Exhibition May 16 - 18
Lot 2
Sylvia Plimack Mangold
American, b. 1938
Untitled (Study for Big Green), 1977
Acrylic on paper, 23 x 29 inches (58.4 x 73.6 cm).
The Collection of Gilbert and Editha F. Carpenter
Est. $15,000-25,000
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