Portrait of Agnes
Martin, New Mexico
1992
by Charles R. Rushton
Courtesy Pace Gallery
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racing forms
by p.c. smith
a gallery tip sheet
Agnes Martin
at Pace Wildenstein
Jan. 16-Feb. 15, 1997
The latest permutations of 84-year-old
Agnes Martin's horizontal, wide-banded
compositions introduce new colors: pale,
atmospheric blues, yellows and yellow-orange, painted in acrylic washes so thin
that these works should probably be termed
watercolors. Horizontal, ruled pencil lines
are clearly visible beneath the slightly
spongy-textured color. Although Martin once
lived on Coenties Slip in downtown
Manhattan and exhibited at Betty Parsons,
and works in rectangular grids, her
temperament has always seemed closer to
West Coast figures like John McLaughlin and
Robert Irwin than the New York Minimalists.
Her delicate touch suggests meditative
emptying rather than systemic addition. Her
work's horizontality makes her compositions
seem less like building structures and more
like landscape and atmospheric light--
Martin paints in a hand-built adobe studio
outside Taos. Still, her insistence on the
rectangular grid as the underlying
principle of organization, and even as the
image of "perfection," is unimaginative and
completely in collusion with the
architecture of institutionalized
academicism.
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