Untitled

Emerging from the deeply-hued inks of Brice Marden’s Untitled are angular twists and turns that evoke the artist’s infamous “glyphs.” These meandering lines are often likened to Chinese calligraphy, a graphic form that had interested Marden ever since a visit to China in the mid-1980s. Others—such as curator Gary Garrels—argue that these linear forms are not meant to be a form of figurative representation, but part of a more universal language of expression. "Marden's glyphs are not Asian characters or calligraphy per se; nor are they pictographs, or volute seashells, or leaves curling into branches of a tree, or renderings of clouds or rocks or ocean waves. The glyphs are all of those things" (G. Garrels, Plane Image: a Brice Marden Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006, p. 87). Less formalized and more enigmatic than some of his truly calligraphic paintings, Untitled is both expressionistic and self-contained, a masterful articulation of the stroke for which Marden is revered.