Lot 54: AGNES MARTIN

1912-2004
UNTITLED IV

72 x 72 in. 183 x 183 cm.

signed and dated 1981 on the reverse

acrylic and graphite on canvas

PROVENANCE

Pace Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1982)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1989

EXHIBITED

New York, Pace Gallery, Agnes Martin: New Paintings, December 1982 - January 1983

NOTE

In 1967, Agnes Martin left New York and abandoned painting in a restless quest for emotional re-invigoration. She traveled through Canada and the western United States, finally settling in New Mexico where she had studied and taught in the 1940s and early 1950s. In 1968, Martin built her home by hand near a remote mesa. Seven years after leaving New York, she returned to painting in the rustic environment of her beloved New Mexican landscape. Her dormant creativity awakened with a renewed vigor and ebullient palette, and the artist considered these works to be her most abstract and liberated.

In the paintings of the 1970s and 1980s, such as the present work, color and area had now become transcendent over line. Martin's tremulous pencil markings of the 1960s yielded to broader bands of lightly tinted color, often inspired by her sandstone and open sky surroundings. From afar, these bands of color can appear flattened and regulated, but up close her brushwork is in fact remarkably dynamic and gradated, yielding varying glimpses of the white primer layer beneath. In the present Untitled, color becomes dematerialized and light seems to emanate from the canvas.

Martin felt deeply that an artist should aspire to represent and reveal reality through their creations, not in a literal sense but in a deeper and more emotive, philosophical and profound manner. As she wrote, "We are in the midst of reality responding with joy. It is an absolutely satisfying experience but extremely elusive... Works of art have successfully represented our response to reality from the beginning. The artist tries to live in a way that will make greater awareness of the sublimity of reality possible. Reality, the truth about life and the mystery of beauty are all the same and they are the first concerns of everyone." (Dieter Schwarz, ed., Agnes Martin: Writings, Ostfildern, 1992, p. 93)