Martha Alf
By Suzanne Hudson
In 1972, a year before Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro opened Womanhouse—a watershed feminist Gesamtkunstwerk that was installed inside a derelict Hollywood mansion—Martha Alf (1930–2019), a newly minted MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, had begun work on her so-called cylinder paintings, the subjects of which were toilet-paper rolls. These had followed a group of canvases depicting sharply rendered kitchen items influenced by the works of the Spanish Baroque painters at the San Diego Museum of Art— Juan Sánchez Cotán and Francisco de Zurbarán—artist mainstays from her years studying and living in that city. (Alf’s play with quotidian objects—produce, pots, pitchers—arranged inside stagelike enclosures recall most directly the austerity of Cotán’s Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, ca. 1602, which depicts the namesake fruits before a pitch-dark aperture, suspended and propped as though on a shelf that assumes the homiletic appearance of an altar.) Indeed, by 1970, Alf was creating pristine renditions of common domestic staples, including personal-hygiene products.
In Spray Deodorant Caps, 1970, the artist stacked two of the titular objects within the composition’s bottom-right quadrant. She arranged these surrogates atop a grayed lilac field that calls to mind a countertop. In the background is an expanse of monochromatic salmon, which could indicate a transition from a horizontal to a vertical (i.e., wall-like) surface, were the shifts between them not so unmodulated and perversely flat. By 1971, Alf started depicting paper-towel rolls, as we see in ZEE GREEN, 1971. The cleaved bichromatic backdrops of works such as Spray Deodorant Caps remain, but the elements relate to one another differently: One roll stands sentry, while the other is prone and partially unspooled. This anthropomorphized pairing evokes a surprisingly intimate relationship.\
“Opposites and Contradictions,” Michael Kohn Gallery’s first posthumous show for Alf, featured the aforementioned works, introducing her art from the 1970s broadly while providing essential context for the cylinder paintings. Her twinned subjects cast shadows incommensurate with the otherwise uniformly flat light in their unmarked surrounds. Isolated in often sherbet-hued environs, Alf’s newer toilet-paper protagonists—oddly intangible but dense, even solid—exist in pairs (notable for the varying intervals of space between them) or, from 1973 on, alone. Shown in an exceptionally beautiful installation here, the relational juxtapositions of palette within individual pieces and across various series more comprehensively argued for her virtuosic use of color: shrill, potent, and utterly exultant. Such combinations as those comprising the 1972 “Costa Brava” series—Costa Brava Red, Costa Brava Blue, and Costa Brava Green—are done an injustice through their uninflected titling, as the hues of Costa Brava Blue come closer to, say, an azure roll before a backdrop of sun-bleached tangerine and deep goldenrod. These confluences seem to acknowledge the precedent of Josef Albers: It appears quite likely that Alf wryly remade his abstract designs of concentric shapes that set off relational interactions of color while preserving the German artist’s use of a compositional template to a kind of formalist end.
Several related cylinder paintings that centered a single roll shifted palettes. Black, 1974, does so most notably with its darkened scheme of multiple color-suffused nonabsolute blacks. A similar triptych was shown at the 1975 Whitney Biennial, where the paintings were installed next to fellow Californian Cristiano Camacho’s Dog Patch Moonlight, 1974: four wooden sculptures (really broad stakes, two sharpened to a point) leaned against the wall. This validating outing is mentioned in materials about Alf, producing a narrative of exhibition as culmination that “Opposites and Contradictions” productively suggested was more of a transitional period. By 1976, Alf was observing a lone banana, recapitulating every bruise and speck in fine pencil. Another grouping of drawings in this show jumped ahead to the 1990s, when the artist was occupied with arrangements of pears, their stems reaching out like antennae and their contours bathed in a mysterious light emanating from outside the frame—a far cry from the hermetic, impenetrably sealed enclosures of the 1970s. The last gallery held three careful and wonderfully astute small drawings of woven canvas, densely gridded fields of texture that redoubled their subjects. From them, things continued to open out and beyond.