It appears overly simplistic, saccharine even, to explain Agnes Martin’s work as pure, however I simply can’t discover a manner round it. Utilizing solely easy strains and grids, usually in grey or very muted colours, Martin by some means distilled the essence of human emotion in footage so seemingly plain you’ll be able to barely {photograph} them. And but they’re so shifting it is not uncommon for even essentially the most art-skeptical amongst us to face in entrance of an Agnes Martin and really feel a way of awe.
Maybe she mentioned it finest: “For those who get up within the morning and you are feeling very pleased, however [there’s] no trigger—that’s what I paint about.”
Martin, who died in 2004 on the age of 92, was effectively into midlife when she hit her first profession peak within the Sixties, after she developed her signature minimal grid. The reception in New York, the place she was dwelling on the time, was rapturous. “The entire artwork world was loving her,” says Marc Glimcher, CEO of Tempo Gallery, which has proven Martin’s work for the reason that Nineteen Seventies.
However the strain was an excessive amount of, and Martin, who had on and off battles with schizophrenia, retreated to her adopted dwelling state of New Mexico, the place she kind of stayed for the remainder of her life. Whereas there, she went via intervals of isolation when she made little or no artwork, and intervals of profound productiveness. Zen Buddhism, particularly its tenet of restraint, was a guiding philosophy all through her profession.
Martin’s many chapters culminate in an arresting physique of labor from the late Nineties and early 2000s known as her Harmless Love work—a number of which has simply gone on view at Tempo’s flagship gallery in New York. For these late work, Martin introduced in additional shade (for her) and gave them whimsical titles like Little Youngsters Loving Love (2001) and I Love Love (1999).
Agnes Martin, Lovely Life, 2000, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60 x 60″.Picture: Peter Clough. © Agnes Martin Basis, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
