Artists & Works |
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| Agnes Martin American (b. Canada, 1912) ON A CLEAR DAY (1973) portfolio of 30 silkscreens, 1 shown each 12” x 12” |
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Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Agnes Martin grew up in Vancouver,
and moved to the United States in 1932. She studied at Western Washington
State College, the University of New Mexico, and Columbia University,
eventually settling in New York, where she had her first show at
Betty Parsons Gallery. At this time, Martin had moved from the figurative
paintings she was making in the forties to simplified, geometric
abstractions. After moving to New Mexico in 1967, she stopped painting
for several years, resuming in the early seventies. Ever since,
she has continued making minimalist work, though her color palette
has become brighter. Martin is known for her all-over grid paintings
as well as paintings that simply contain vertical or horizontal
bands. Agnes Martin's use of pared-down, basic geometric forms is at its most typical in this print portfolio, which is the only suite of prints Martin has ever made. On a Clear Day is made up of thirty individual prints, repetious units which together form a balanced whole. The small grids, methodical and meditative, are meant to reflect and evoke nature, as indicated by the title. It is also the title of a 2001 documentary on Martin by German filmmaker Thomas Luechinger. |
CRITICAL EXCERPTS |
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Agnes Martin, and Ann Wilson, “The Untroubled Mind,”
Flash Art 41 (June 1973) |
| Kenneth Baker, San
Francisco Chronicle, 7/14/95 “For the past 25 years, Martin has lived in isolation in New Mexico. She is admired in part because in the late '60s, having suffered a loss of conviction in her work, she walked out on the promotional machinery of the New York art world when it was in high gear and going her way. Her suite of 30 serigraphs here dates from the period when she had left off painting. The prints are brittle-looking gray grids printed on 15-inch squares of cream paper. Because the grids have the same exterior measure and differ in internal structure, we tend to see them as variants on each other. Our task is to see and accept each one as unique, uncompromised by reference to the others, despite reverberations among them.” |
| Donald Kuspit, Artforum,
3/93 “From the early '60s to the late '80s, the grid in Agnes Martin's work shifts from relative differentiation to relative undifferentiation--to an increasing sense of entropy. Her early grids are constituted by small, obviously handmade marks--confirming the "naturalness" signaled by such titles as Gray Stone II, 1961 and Milk River, 1963--that seem to undermine the axiomative uniformity of the grid, however unassailable it remains. In contrast, the surfaces of the later, untitled grids seem almost inhumanly slick, as though made by a robotic hand. One wonders if the abstract sublime has not turned into tedium vitae. The grid has all the simplicity and dullness of eternity, but Martin initially tried to make it timely, "touching," and subliminally complicated through texture. She "rearranged" it as much as seemed possible without disintegrating it, experimentally narrowing or broadening the space between the lines (whether horizontal or vertical). It is as though the space were secretly alive however inert it appears. She was trying within her stringent economy of means to make the universal grid--symbol of her monastic way of life--seem very particular and spirited as well as full of unexpected harmonies. In the process she created a perceptual epiphany of its inevitability. It is as though Martin had been trying to render the details unique and unrepeatable, even though the grid as a whole remained identical.” |