American Art Collaborative

For more than four decades, Agnes Martin created luminously beautiful works of art within the rigorously simplified language of the grid. The framework of the grid—horizontal and vertical lines of varying length, distance, and weight—provided the artist a visual template through which to explore seemingly infinite expressions of abstract two-dimensional space. From 1957 to 1967, Martin lived and worked in a studio in Lower Manhattan and was associated with a group of American modernists that included Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Ellsworth Kelly. In 1958, she had her first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, home to a stable of New York School painters. Martin’s work comes out of this tradition of Abstract Expressionism, and her paintings display great affinities with the sublime abstraction that characterizes Newman’s and Rothko’s canvases. In Martin’s Untitled #6, for instance, the horizontal bands of color, with their suggestion of limitless space and atmospheric formlessness, contribute to the transcendental quality of the painting. In 1967, Martin left New York to settle in New Mexico, where she maintained a studio for the rest of her life. The influence of the Southwest’s landscape, with its wide-open plains, is expressed in the meditative expanse of her paintings. Martin’s works, in this sense, are experienced rather than simply viewed. She characterized the experience of her art, quoted in her 1991 Writings, as: “A world without objects, without interruption, making a work without interruption or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of the simple direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.” In order to achieve this phenomenological effect, Martin scaled her canvases to approximate the size of her viewers; she wanted her paintings to be big enough so that one could visually “step into” the experience of them. From the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s, she painted square canvases measuring six by six feet. When these large canvases became increasingly difficult for the artist to maneuver in her studio, she decreased their dimensions, as in Untitled #6, to five by five feet. Martin’s art also exhibits certain affinities with the American Minimalist movement that arose out of the late 1960s and 1970s, although throughout her career she refused the classification as a Minimalist artist. Untitled #6, with its horizontal graphite lines and luminous bands of pink, employs the language of formal reduction and seriality shared by the Minimalists. Furthermore, by the early 1960s, Martin had established her own unique vocabulary of the grid—soon to become a Minimalist staple. Yet whereas Minimalist works are often industrially fabricated, Martin’s work was meticulously executed by the artist herself. In this painting, the artist’s concentrated labor is visible in the thinly painted veils of color—alternating shades of pink—punctuated by carefully drafted horizontal lines. The handmade quality of her paintings—for example, the tenuous and subtly irregular graphite lines of Untitled #6—exemplifies the tension that Martin explores in her art between perfection and its ultimate unattainability. These fragile, hand-drawn lines stop just short of the edges of the canvas, only partially containing the floating rectangles of color behind their borders. Martin’s paintings are staged in this gap between ideals and irregularities, between the perfect and the imperfect. As Martin herself wrote in 1972, “The work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but…the paintings are very far from being perfect—completely removed in fact—even as we ourselves are.”Sharon Corwin