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拍品專文
With its pale, tremulous pale bands of blue, peach and cream, Untitled #17 is a work of quiet radiance dating from Agnes Martin’s extraordinary final decade. Painted in 1996, and included in her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art four years later, it belongs to one of her most joyful and life-affirming bodies of work. In 1993 Martin had returned to Taos, where she had lived during her earliest days in New Mexico. There, amid the desert landscapes that had first inspired her art, she worked in solitary contentment. With examples held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, the paintings of 1996 demonstrate the subtle new palettes and delicate luminosity that Martin cultivated during this period. The following year she was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, crowning a practice unwavering in its pursuit of serenity, happiness and momentary perfection.
Martin was born on the rural plains of Saskatchewan, Canada: her grandparents had emigrated from Scotland to the prairies on covered wagons. She grew up in Vancouver before moving to New York, where she studied during the 1940s and 1950s. It was there that she encountered some of her most important early influences, including the works of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, as well as Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism that were popular among John Cage, Philip Guston and others. During this period Martin also began what was to become a lifelong relationship with New Mexico, living and working in Taos and elsewhere. Her early works, informed by a mixture of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, brought her to the attention of the dealer Betty Parsons, who encouraged her to move back to New York in 1957. There, Martin spent ten years ensconced in the thriving artistic community of Lower Manhattan’s Coenties Slip, forging close friendships with Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.
Early on, Martin harnessed the grid as a guiding structural principle in her works. It was not until her return to New Mexico, however, that she began to embrace the horizontal bands that would define her practice for the next three decades. Martin had left New York in 1967, fuelled by the death of Reinhardt, the demolition of her studio building and a desire to live a more simple life. She travelled Canada and America in a camper van before settling on a remote plot in Cuba, New Mexico, where she lived alone and off-grid in a house she built herself. After a five-year break from art-making, Martin began to paint again around 1974, taking a new studio in Galisteo in 1977. With their quivering strips of colour, stacked to the sky like overlapping horizon lines, these works were powerful expressions of harmony, tranquillity and stillness. Animated solely by the frisson between each band of colour and its neighbour, paintings such as the present conjure a kind of visual silence, unmarred by the distractions of the outside world.
At their core, however, Martin’s paintings sought to capture the inarticulate feelings of wonder and joy that we experience in the face of perceived perfection. ‘The Greeks made a great discovery’, she observed; ‘they discovered that in Nature there are no perfect circles or straight lines or equal spaces. Yet, they discovered that their interest and inclination was in the perfection of circles and lines, and that in their minds they could see them and that they were able to make them’ (A. Martin, ‘What we do not see if we do not see’, in D. Schwarz (ed.), Agnes Martin: Writings, Winterthur 1991, p. 117). While much of Martin’s oeuvre seems to align with the aesthetics of Minimalism—a movement that placed formal precision at its core—the presence of her own hand in its pencilled lines and washes of colour ultimately sets her work apart from such comparisons. The condition that paintings such as the present aspire to is that of waterfalls, sunsets or ocean horizons, each riddled with irregularity but nonetheless—to the human mind—‘perfect’.
The 1990s was an important time for Martin. Her work had begun to accrue significant institutional acclaim during the previous decade, culminating in retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1991 and the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1993, as well as her first major US museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992. As she took up residence once more in her beloved Taos, she continued to develop her practice, exploring new hues and revisiting old motifs. Many of her works from this period bore titles relating to love, happiness and innocence, including a major group of paintings donated to the Harwood Museum, Taos in 1997. In her final decade, Martin’s work shone with a newfound sense of peace. Though almost transparent in its delicate pallor, the present work glows brightly, alive with the conviction of a life lived through paint.
Martin was born on the rural plains of Saskatchewan, Canada: her grandparents had emigrated from Scotland to the prairies on covered wagons. She grew up in Vancouver before moving to New York, where she studied during the 1940s and 1950s. It was there that she encountered some of her most important early influences, including the works of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, as well as Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism that were popular among John Cage, Philip Guston and others. During this period Martin also began what was to become a lifelong relationship with New Mexico, living and working in Taos and elsewhere. Her early works, informed by a mixture of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, brought her to the attention of the dealer Betty Parsons, who encouraged her to move back to New York in 1957. There, Martin spent ten years ensconced in the thriving artistic community of Lower Manhattan’s Coenties Slip, forging close friendships with Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.
Early on, Martin harnessed the grid as a guiding structural principle in her works. It was not until her return to New Mexico, however, that she began to embrace the horizontal bands that would define her practice for the next three decades. Martin had left New York in 1967, fuelled by the death of Reinhardt, the demolition of her studio building and a desire to live a more simple life. She travelled Canada and America in a camper van before settling on a remote plot in Cuba, New Mexico, where she lived alone and off-grid in a house she built herself. After a five-year break from art-making, Martin began to paint again around 1974, taking a new studio in Galisteo in 1977. With their quivering strips of colour, stacked to the sky like overlapping horizon lines, these works were powerful expressions of harmony, tranquillity and stillness. Animated solely by the frisson between each band of colour and its neighbour, paintings such as the present conjure a kind of visual silence, unmarred by the distractions of the outside world.
At their core, however, Martin’s paintings sought to capture the inarticulate feelings of wonder and joy that we experience in the face of perceived perfection. ‘The Greeks made a great discovery’, she observed; ‘they discovered that in Nature there are no perfect circles or straight lines or equal spaces. Yet, they discovered that their interest and inclination was in the perfection of circles and lines, and that in their minds they could see them and that they were able to make them’ (A. Martin, ‘What we do not see if we do not see’, in D. Schwarz (ed.), Agnes Martin: Writings, Winterthur 1991, p. 117). While much of Martin’s oeuvre seems to align with the aesthetics of Minimalism—a movement that placed formal precision at its core—the presence of her own hand in its pencilled lines and washes of colour ultimately sets her work apart from such comparisons. The condition that paintings such as the present aspire to is that of waterfalls, sunsets or ocean horizons, each riddled with irregularity but nonetheless—to the human mind—‘perfect’.
The 1990s was an important time for Martin. Her work had begun to accrue significant institutional acclaim during the previous decade, culminating in retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1991 and the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1993, as well as her first major US museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992. As she took up residence once more in her beloved Taos, she continued to develop her practice, exploring new hues and revisiting old motifs. Many of her works from this period bore titles relating to love, happiness and innocence, including a major group of paintings donated to the Harwood Museum, Taos in 1997. In her final decade, Martin’s work shone with a newfound sense of peace. Though almost transparent in its delicate pallor, the present work glows brightly, alive with the conviction of a life lived through paint.