Hyperallergenic: Seeing Ourselves Through Martha Alf’s Paintings of Toilet Paper Rolls
Alf transformed rolls of toilet paper and paper towels into monolithic altars set against a backdrop resembling an Ellsworth Kelly geometric abstraction.
Installation view of Martha Alf’s pear drawings in Martha Alf: Opposites and Contradictions at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by David S. Rubin, Hyperallergenic.
Excerpt from article by David S. Rubin, Hyperallergenic, July 18, 2023:
LOS ANGELES — Although Martha Alf (1930-2019) is recognized for her distinctive pear drawings, her inaugural posthumous exhibition at the Michael Kohn Gallery, Opposites and Contradictions, sheds new light on her breakthrough moment as a painter. While the exhibition presents a small selection of later drawings, hung salon-style, the primary focus is on the body of work that earned Alf a place in the 1975 Whitney Biennial: her paintings of toilet paper rolls, which she preferred to call “cylinders.” Such phrasing is significant because, by this point in her career, she was a formalist who boldly applied what she learned about abstract painting to still life, but with a twist in the form of unconventional subject matter. As she wrote at the time, she was “finding reality through…