Lining the spiraling walls of the famous rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, “Agnes Martin,” a major retrospective of the artist’s work, is the first since her death in 2004. It runs through January 11, 2017. PROVOKR is previewing the show with a portfolio of selected work in the exhibit, below.
Martin was born in Canada in 1912 and became an American citizen in 1950. She was one of the few female stars of the Abstract Expressionist generation of postwar New York, living on Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, a neighbor of Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and James Rosenquist. After suffering through bouts of schizophrenia, she moved out in the ’70s to New Mexico and lived there monastically, attracted to Buddhism and Eastern beliefs, till she died. Martin is most often associated with Minimalism, because of her use of pencil grids and spare bands of muted color, but she spoke rapturously of the natural landscape and the emotive and expressive power of art in a very un-Minimalist way. “It’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in landscape,” she said of her work. “I would say that my response to nature is really a response to beauty. The water looks beautiful, the trees look beautiful, even the dust looks beautiful. It is beauty that really calls.”
