Agnes Martin - Artistic Style

Artistic Style

In addition to a couple of self-portraits and a few watercolor landscapes, Martin's early works include biomorphic paintings in subdued colors made when the artist had a grant to work in Taos between 1955 and 1957. However, she did her best to seek out and destroy paintings from the years when she was taking her first steps into abstraction.

Martin praised Rothko for having "reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth." Following his example Martin also pared down to the most reductive elements to encourage a perception of perfection and to emphasize transcendent reality. Her signature style is defined by an emphasis upon line, grids, and fields of extremely subtle color. Particularly in her breakthrough years of the early 1960s, she created 6x6 foot square canvases that were covered in dense, minute and softly delineated graphite grids. In the 1966 exhibition Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Martin's grids were therefore celebrated as examples of Minimalist art and were hung among works by artists including Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Donald Judd. While minimalist in form, however, these paintings were quite different in spirit from those of her other minimalist counterparts, retaining small flaws and unmistakable traces of the artist's hand; she shied away from intellectualism, favoring the personal and spiritual. Her paintings, statements, and influential writings often reflect an interest in Eastern philosophy, especially Taoist. Because of her work's added spiritual dimension, which became more and more dominant after 1967, she preferred to be classified as an abstract expressionist.

Martin worked only in black, white, and brown before moving to New Mexico. The last painting before she abandoned painting and left New York in 1967, Trumpet, marks a departure in that the single rectangle evolves into an overall grid of rectangles, here drawn in pencil over uneven washes of gray translucent paint. In 1973, she returned to art making, and produced a portfolio of 30 serigraphs, On a Clear Day. During her time in Taos, she introduced light pastel washes to her grids, colors that shimmered in the changing light. Later, Martin reduced the scale of her signature 72 x 72 square paintings to 60 x 60 inches, and shifted her work to use bands of ethereal colour. Another departure is a modification, if not a refinement, of the grid structure Martin has used since the late 1950s. In Untitled No. 4 (1994), for example, one views the gentle striations of pencil line and primary color washes of diluted acrylic paint blended with gesso; the lines are not measured by a ruler, but rather intuitively marked by the artist., In the 1990s, symmetry would often give way to varying widths of horizontal bands.