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Lot Essay
In the luminous Untitled #13, Agnes Martin paints broad, centralized bands that reach to the vertical limits of the frame. The work seems to radiate with color and movement, due to Martin's layered washes of coral paint, and subtle irregularly spaced bands. Her composition delicately eludes the symmetry of her six-foot-square support, characteristic of her aim to find beauty in slightly imperfect abstract arrangements: according to the artist, "My formats are square, but the [imagery] is never absolutely square...making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn't set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power" (A. Martin, quoted in Dieter Schwarz (ed.), Agnes Martin Writings, Winterthur, 1992, p. 29). On a monumental scale, Martin's work appears to expand and contract, merge and separate, in perpetual flux.
In the 1975 work, Martin begins by drawing graphite lines on gessoed surfaces, using tautly stretched strings as guides. She renders each line with intense concentration and halting progress, seen in the visible tremors of the obviously hand-made final product. Here, she varies the spaces ever so slightly, not only creating a sense of oscillation but also an imperfect trace of her human touch. In Untitled, Martin's skill wielding acrylic paint on gessoed ground appears at once opaque and fluid over chalky pale pink. Mixing and diluting acrylic paint to find the perfect shade, Martin lays down color in washy layers of vivid, sandy-coral pinks, suffusing the picture with dynamic movement and poetic ethereality.
In 1968, the artist moved to a remote mesa in the Southwest desert and gave up painting for six years. From 1974-76, Martin returned to painting, introducing sheer washes of color that elaborated her earlier explorations of light. In Untitled, Martin's pink acrylic paint glows with a sumptuous radiance--illustrating the sublime brilliant tonalities found in nature. Her dusty hues and pearly light distinctly evoke the red sandstone cliffs and hazy landscape of New Mexico's desert. Her surroundings' vast expanses and boundless depths have all provided inspiration, limitless in their cadence of light, form and color that proved infinitely inspirational. Martin aimed to capture the indefinable sensations experienced when contemplating the natural world--desert plains and big skies, in all their sublime beauty. The artist explained that her art is "really about the feeling of beauty and freedom, that you experience in landscape...My response to nature is really a response to beauty" (A. Martin, quoted in I. Sandler, Art Monthly, September 1993, p. 4).
While her economy of form and geometric order align her with the Minimalists, Martin's mode abstraction aligns more closely with the Abstract Expressionist painters. The rigidity of her methodical, linear structure is counterbalanced by the visible tactility of her brushstrokes and graphite lines. In Untitled, her gestural brushstrokes and luminous color draw on the sublime pictures of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko; as Martin affirmed, "I consider myself one of them. They had a whole philosophy. They dealt directly with those subtle emotions of happiness that I'm talking about" (A. Martin, quoted in 3x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin, New York, 2005, p. 49).
From Barnett Newman, Martin learned how a straight line may register direction and velocity across the surface. Indeed, in Untitled, Martin renders line so that it appears with significant weight and expressiveness, appearing more like an actor within a pictorial field than simply a graphic contour. Yet where Newman focused on the zip's robust vertical chasm, and Mark Rothko devoted himself to sublime color fields, Martin's explored luminous, chromatic stripes that suggest the infinite expanses of the sublime. She renders Untitled so that it is not simply looked at, but also intimately felt. The work, with its dusty, ethereal light, seems to transcend the confines of the picture plane and visually echo the ethos of Martin's mentor Mark Rothko when he said, "I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human" (M. Rothko, quoted by M. Auping, A. Karnes and M. Thistlethwaite (eds.), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 110, London, 2002, p. 284).
In the 1975 work, Martin begins by drawing graphite lines on gessoed surfaces, using tautly stretched strings as guides. She renders each line with intense concentration and halting progress, seen in the visible tremors of the obviously hand-made final product. Here, she varies the spaces ever so slightly, not only creating a sense of oscillation but also an imperfect trace of her human touch. In Untitled, Martin's skill wielding acrylic paint on gessoed ground appears at once opaque and fluid over chalky pale pink. Mixing and diluting acrylic paint to find the perfect shade, Martin lays down color in washy layers of vivid, sandy-coral pinks, suffusing the picture with dynamic movement and poetic ethereality.
In 1968, the artist moved to a remote mesa in the Southwest desert and gave up painting for six years. From 1974-76, Martin returned to painting, introducing sheer washes of color that elaborated her earlier explorations of light. In Untitled, Martin's pink acrylic paint glows with a sumptuous radiance--illustrating the sublime brilliant tonalities found in nature. Her dusty hues and pearly light distinctly evoke the red sandstone cliffs and hazy landscape of New Mexico's desert. Her surroundings' vast expanses and boundless depths have all provided inspiration, limitless in their cadence of light, form and color that proved infinitely inspirational. Martin aimed to capture the indefinable sensations experienced when contemplating the natural world--desert plains and big skies, in all their sublime beauty. The artist explained that her art is "really about the feeling of beauty and freedom, that you experience in landscape...My response to nature is really a response to beauty" (A. Martin, quoted in I. Sandler, Art Monthly, September 1993, p. 4).
While her economy of form and geometric order align her with the Minimalists, Martin's mode abstraction aligns more closely with the Abstract Expressionist painters. The rigidity of her methodical, linear structure is counterbalanced by the visible tactility of her brushstrokes and graphite lines. In Untitled, her gestural brushstrokes and luminous color draw on the sublime pictures of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko; as Martin affirmed, "I consider myself one of them. They had a whole philosophy. They dealt directly with those subtle emotions of happiness that I'm talking about" (A. Martin, quoted in 3x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin, New York, 2005, p. 49).
From Barnett Newman, Martin learned how a straight line may register direction and velocity across the surface. Indeed, in Untitled, Martin renders line so that it appears with significant weight and expressiveness, appearing more like an actor within a pictorial field than simply a graphic contour. Yet where Newman focused on the zip's robust vertical chasm, and Mark Rothko devoted himself to sublime color fields, Martin's explored luminous, chromatic stripes that suggest the infinite expanses of the sublime. She renders Untitled so that it is not simply looked at, but also intimately felt. The work, with its dusty, ethereal light, seems to transcend the confines of the picture plane and visually echo the ethos of Martin's mentor Mark Rothko when he said, "I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human" (M. Rothko, quoted by M. Auping, A. Karnes and M. Thistlethwaite (eds.), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 110, London, 2002, p. 284).