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 his defining moment as a painter. While the exhibition features a small selection of later drawings, hung salon-style, the focus is on the body of work that won Alf a place at the 1975 Whitney Biennial: her paintings of toilet paper rolls, which she preferred to call “cylinders”. .” Such phrasing is significant because, at this point in her career, she was a formalist who boldly applied what she had 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 “experienced reality through an artificial arrangement usually associated with the stage or an altar, which elevates the most mundane material objects of our society to the authoritative power of an icon. It’s about the absurdity of the idea that a roll of toilet paper is so important to our society that it can become its symbol.

Born into the silent generation, Alf was a frustrated teacher’s wife in the 1950s and would never identify as a feminist. Nonetheless, the women’s liberation movement affected her enough that she earned her MFA in 1970 at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she explored abstract painting, became involved in the burgeoning art scene of Southern California and expanded his knowledge and understanding of contemporary art.

Before entering UCLA, Alf painted kitchen still lifes in a style influenced by the Spanish Baroque master Francisco de Zurbarán, which depicted fruit and everyday objects lined up horizontally on a shelf and emphasized volume through strong contrasts of shadow and light. After graduating, she returned to this subject and this format, but with two major changes. Reflecting her earlier life as a housewife, her favorite objects were now cheap consumer items from the local supermarket, and the compositions became increasingly abstract. At a time when representation and abstraction were seen as polar opposites, Alf began to merge the two.

Without renouncing light and shadow in “Spray Deodorant Caps” (1970), Alf painted a cylindrical shape made by stacking a light pink deodorant cap on a darker pink, and reversed the color scheme on the ground by placing this homemade sculpture on a light pink shelf on a dark pink background. For “Zee Green” (1971), inspired by the pastel colors of paper towels, tissues and toilet paper of the 1970s, she created an interaction between the two rolls of paper towels by putting one upright and by laying the other side down, prefiguring the anthropomorphic properties. she would end up giving to the pears. The whole thing sits on a pink shelf against a powder blue background, a palette she’s called “bathroom colors.”

Toilet paper rolls first appear in Alf’s paintings in 1971, a year before female artists in Southern California installed three concept bathrooms for the landmark exhibit Women’s house. In her Costa Brava (1972), which presents the scrolls in pairs, she seemed to enjoy exploring color relationships in the manner of Josef Albers, but working with figurative imagery rooted in domestic consumer culture.

Moving to depictions of the single scroll in 1973, Alf placed his subject center stage and perfected his treatment of light and shadow, essentially transforming each scroll into a monolithic altar against a backdrop resembling geometric abstraction. by Ellsworth Kelly. In the previous examples, the rolls are rendered in intensified tones of actual toilet paper, such as blue and salmon. From 1974, she painted the scrolls in the improbable color black, giving her cylindrical altars funerary accents. She created her ultimate parody of male-dominated high art with “Black” (1974), in which she satirizes Ad Reinhardt by centering a roll of black toilet paper in a monochromatic black field. Although it may seem critical at first glance, both artists considered their images to be iconic. So, in reality, Alf was paying homage.

Martha Alf: opposites and contradictions continues at the Michael Kohn Gallery (1227 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles) through August 5. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.