Martha Diamond Finally Gets Her Own Show in Europe Martha Diamond at the Sara Hildén Art Museum

By George Nelson

New York painter Martha Diamond had to wait until she was dead before landing her first solo show in Europe. Having toured the self-titled exhibition at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland (sadly just on FaceTime), I find it hard to fathom why a European solo exhibition took so long.

The exhibition opened on 19 September and runs until 17 January 2027. It traces her movement between architecture and abstraction, from the geometric, almost archetypal forms of her early paintings to the New York cityscapes that became a defining part of her work during the 1980s. Buildings, windows and high-rises punctuate the show, while many of the canvases are reflected in the museum’s polished floor, like shadows of buildings. The museum’s geometric architecture and expansive spaces echo the structures and shifting perspectives in Diamond’s paintings.

“We kind of felt a perfect match here,” Sarianne Soikkonen, the museum’s chief curator of exhibitions, told me during the tour.

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After the tour, I called Olivia Funk, director of the Martha Diamond Trust, to ask why a European solo exhibition had taken so long. She suggested that the association with New York may have narrowed the way curators understood Diamond’s work.

“It’s very easy, or I would assume, it’s easy for curators or the quote-unquote ‘artworld’ to pin her as the New York painter and think that’s it,” she told me. “And so often, even now, when people talk about her work, it’s cityscape, cityscape.” Funk said the description misses something essential because Diamond’s “work is so much more than that”.

That may be part of the explanation, though it hardly makes the long wait less puzzling. Funk described Diamond “as an artist who couldn’t easily be slotted into a particular movement or category, and whose work seemed to anticipate things that came later”.

Then there is the practical business of bringing the paintings together in a gallery. As Funk put it: “It’s hard to hang Martha with Martha because it’s so powerful.”