Agnes Martin
07 Nov 2015 - 06 Mar 2016
This retrospective of the artistic achievement of the American painter Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004) is the first to be held after her death, and represents an opportunity to rediscover her extraordinary work in all of its facets. Martin’s artistic career is outlined by means of paintings, drawings, and prints, all the way from the early pictures, to the experimental works and assemblages produced in New York in the 1950s, and to the consummate late works.
With its commitment to abstraction, her soft-spoken oeuvre evolved in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism and minimalist tendencies. Beginning in the 1960s, Martin’s artistic vocabulary concentrated on horizontal and vertical lines that structure the picture surface in grid fashion or subdivide it into stripes. Playing an essential role on her matt, almost exclusively square canvases and sheets of paper is the interplay of penciled lines and a reduced palette of delicate gray and chromatic tones. On the basis of this concentration and reduction, Martin developed a pictorial universe of overwhelming richness, one that offers mesmerizing visual experiences to the patient eye.
Early on in her artistic career, Martin won the recognition into New York’s male-dominated art scene. It is primarily the artists of Martin’s own and subsequent generations who have been durably impressed by this artist – who spent most of her life in the solitude of New Mexico. That her works remains relatively unfamiliar is largely because they are rarely encountered in galleries and museum collections. In 2011, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen was able to acquire a painting, which has since then been presented in the so-called "American Gallery" (Robert Rademacher Galerie) in the company of her contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko.
With this retrospective, the Tate Modern, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York honor this remarkable painter, whose role and importance for the art of the 20th century has yet to be adequately appreciated, and will hopefully now be reappraised. The exhibition includes 70 paintings, approximately 35 drawings, as well as the print cycle On a Clear Day.
Exhibition organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Curator at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen: Maria Müller-Schareck
With its commitment to abstraction, her soft-spoken oeuvre evolved in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism and minimalist tendencies. Beginning in the 1960s, Martin’s artistic vocabulary concentrated on horizontal and vertical lines that structure the picture surface in grid fashion or subdivide it into stripes. Playing an essential role on her matt, almost exclusively square canvases and sheets of paper is the interplay of penciled lines and a reduced palette of delicate gray and chromatic tones. On the basis of this concentration and reduction, Martin developed a pictorial universe of overwhelming richness, one that offers mesmerizing visual experiences to the patient eye.
Early on in her artistic career, Martin won the recognition into New York’s male-dominated art scene. It is primarily the artists of Martin’s own and subsequent generations who have been durably impressed by this artist – who spent most of her life in the solitude of New Mexico. That her works remains relatively unfamiliar is largely because they are rarely encountered in galleries and museum collections. In 2011, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen was able to acquire a painting, which has since then been presented in the so-called "American Gallery" (Robert Rademacher Galerie) in the company of her contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko.
With this retrospective, the Tate Modern, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York honor this remarkable painter, whose role and importance for the art of the 20th century has yet to be adequately appreciated, and will hopefully now be reappraised. The exhibition includes 70 paintings, approximately 35 drawings, as well as the print cycle On a Clear Day.
Exhibition organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Curator at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen: Maria Müller-Schareck