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Lot Essay
"The rectangle, the plane, the structure, the picture are but sounding boards for a spirit" – Brice Marden
In 1963 Marden graduated from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he studied alongside Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, and Richard Serra, and moved from New Haven to New York with his young family. While it was at Yale that Marden began to explore the vertical and horizontal strictures of the rectangle, it was in New York in the sixties that he developed his signature monochrome style for which he is celebrated. Characterized by a restrained, at times almost foreboding, palette and a generally horizontal format, Marden’s early work is charged with pictorial incident and dense painterly evidence.
While a seemingly a classic example of reductive painting due to the artist’s monochromatic color choice and embrace of the square, the heavily worked surface of Untitled evidences Marden’s quietly gestural utilization of both charcoal and paint. Marden’s deft ability to negotiate the metaphysical and the concrete—the spiritual and the object-like nature of painting—continually sets the artist apart from his contemporaries. As critic Peter Schjeldahl canonized him on the occasion of his 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: Marden can be recognized “as the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades” (“True Colors,” The New Yorker, 6 November 2006, 130).
In 1963 Marden graduated from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he studied alongside Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, and Richard Serra, and moved from New Haven to New York with his young family. While it was at Yale that Marden began to explore the vertical and horizontal strictures of the rectangle, it was in New York in the sixties that he developed his signature monochrome style for which he is celebrated. Characterized by a restrained, at times almost foreboding, palette and a generally horizontal format, Marden’s early work is charged with pictorial incident and dense painterly evidence.
While a seemingly a classic example of reductive painting due to the artist’s monochromatic color choice and embrace of the square, the heavily worked surface of Untitled evidences Marden’s quietly gestural utilization of both charcoal and paint. Marden’s deft ability to negotiate the metaphysical and the concrete—the spiritual and the object-like nature of painting—continually sets the artist apart from his contemporaries. As critic Peter Schjeldahl canonized him on the occasion of his 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: Marden can be recognized “as the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades” (“True Colors,” The New Yorker, 6 November 2006, 130).