Beschreibung:

Agnes Martin Untitled #4 1992 Acrylic and graphite on canvas. 72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm). Signed and dated “a. martin 1992” on the reverse.
Provenance The Pace Gallery, New York; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; The Pace Gallery, New York Catalogue Essay “Agnes Martin is a legend in American art. The spare abstract paintings she has produced over the past forty years - graphite lines drawn across white, gray, or delicately colored canvases - are as little-changing as icons. Her published observations on art and life are written in a style both oracular and Shakerplain. Her long residence in New Mexico, in a house she built with her own hands on a remote mesa, has placed her, for many, in the august but eccentric company of the United States's isolated artists - Winslow Homer on the coast of Maine, Albert Pinkham Ryder in his Manhattan apartment - who choose to stay far removed from the mainstream.” (H. Cotter, “Profiles: Agnes Martin abstract painter”, Art Journal, Fall, 1998) In Agnes Martin’s signature form, the horizontal stripe, the viewer approaches beauty and the emotions of life as the artist intended. Working with the horizontal line for the last thirty years of her career, Agnes Martin explores the function of life’s crucial moments—birth, death, joy and sadness—on canvas in an elegiac manner. Her steady graphite line balances the blue palette in harmony. In the mid-1960s, Agnes Martin was applauded as a herald of the cool geometric Minimalism that was emerging in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. Martin, however, personally declined the connection, for she regarded the Minimalist approach as impersonal and dispassionate; her own abstractions were a combination of ideal geometry and the lightest touch of the artist’s hand to achieve a pitch of emotion and feeling. While the formal regularity of Martin’s work led her to be grouped with the Minimalists, she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Her serial devotion to abstract color and straight form allude to the works of Mark Rothko and Robert Ryman The analogy of these classic grid paintings to the vast, open landscape of both her upbringing in Saskatchewan, Canada and her mature years spent in New Mexico is quite literal. Paying homage to the physical surroundings around her, Martin venerates the environment by capturing its calm and beautiful essence, eclipsing the standard and literal forms of landscape painting (fig1). The relationship between a rectangular canvas and the horizon line in Western cultures is a common template that we have accepted through years of engrained visual reference. At first we are able to accept Martin’s canvas as a landscape. Yet upon closer investigation it is clear that the artist divides each section of her canvas, by drawing her horizontal line over the square canvas, and dissects it into rectangular shapes. There is a tension between the square and the rectangle, a struggle for dominance. Martin has admitted to their conflicting relationship, acknowledging the irresolvable tension her canvas creates for the viewer, “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” (Agnes Martin quoted in D. Schwartz, ed., Agnes Martin Writings, Germany, 1992, p. 29). One is reminded, by analyzing her abstract form of expression, of her strong relationship the classic “grid” paintings of Piet Mondrian (fig 2) “My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything—no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you don’t encounter anything. 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