Exhibition - Agnes Martin
In Search of the Miraculous
Marlborough Gallery
Exhibition: January - 11 March, 2023
Opening: January 2023
Agnes Martin, Untitled #11, 1985.
Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 inches (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Courtesy of the Agnes Martin Foundation.
In Search of the Miraculous, is a group exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, New York, comprised of selected works by twenty-seven artists. This exhibition is embraces the many sublime, subtle, and obsessive tendencies present in art that may be perceived as transcendent. The title is reminiscent of P.D. Ouspensky’s treatise from 1949 recounting his associations with G.I. Gurdjieff. The connectedness between the different ideas presented in this exhibition is not intellectually or historically explicit; it is by all accounts an unconventional, intuitive, exhibition that must be discovered through personal experience.
The project began as a conversation about the subtle tones and light found in the work of Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt, whose works are included in the exhibition. It later evolved to orchestrate a polyphony of voices from many generations, geographies, and approaches to art-making. Among the works include Agnes Martin’s art.
Interested in the transcendent possibilities of painting, Martin was a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists and identified her work with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Nevertheless, her work played an important role in the rise of minimalism. Martin developed her signature format: six by six foot painted canvases, covered from edge to edge with carefully penciled grids and finished with a light layer of gesso.
Martin's intricate and delicate grids, bands and blocks, painted in muted colors, convey the artist's lifelong quest for tranquility and sublime beauty. Martin developed one of the most rigorous, moving and coherent body of work of the 20th century. Martin’s paintings elegantly negotiate the confines of structure, space, draftsmanship, and the metaphysical.
About:
Agnes Martin (1912-2004, Saskatchewan, Canada) was an American-Canadian painter known for her pared-down geometric abstractions. She received a BS and an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, in 1941 and 1952. Major exhibitions of Martin’s work have been organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Philadelphia (1973); Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London (1977); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1991); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1993); and Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York (2004). Agnes Martin, a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work, was presented at Tate Modern, London (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2015–16); and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016). The exhibition travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the fall of 2016. Martin has been honored with, among other awards, the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (1987), Oskar Kokoschka Prize (1992), Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale (1997), National Medal of Arts from the Office of the President (1998), and Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2005). Today, her works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
Website: www.marlboroughnewyork.com
Marlborough Gallery
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