Painter
Brice Marden (American, b.1938) is often associated with Minimalism and is best known for his subtle explorations of color, texture, and form in his work. Marden was born in Bronxville, NY, and attended Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts before receiving an MFA at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1963. While still a student, Marden developed his formal style of abstract painting, and gave up his early preoccupation with figural techniques. Though his early works reference an objective creator and the purity of minimalism, Marden has described these works as highly emotional and subjective. His paintings are either monochrome or composed of different color fields that are painted in a rich but atmospheric manner.
Marden moved to New York in 1963, and then traveled to Greece and Asia in the beginning of the 1970s; his impressions of the southern European landscape, as well as of antique mythology and Greek architecture, have left a great impact on his work. In the 1970s, Marden’s colors and shapes became lighter and more fluid than those of his earlier works, and the size of his paintings more monumental. Marden also profoundly changed his formal technique after an additional stay in Asia; in the works Marden created after this trip, his curved lines overlap such as
Beyond Eagles Mere, creating visual parallels with East Asian writing and with the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism. Marden has exhibited his work internationally, including exhibitions at Documenta 5 in 1972 in Kassel, as well as retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Marden, now regarded as one of the most important Contemporary Abstract painters, lives in New York.