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When Martin first returned to New Mexico after years of working in New York City, followed by a nearly three-year detour across North America in her camper, she initially did not paint at all. Surrounded by orderly horizontal lines and peaceful blue and white pigment, one enters a kind of haven. The space offers a restorative and refreshing retreat from the messiness of daily life. Martin spent almost four decades in that state, and the Harwood’s Agnes Martin Gallery provides great insight into her oeuvre. Paintings of squares have never seemed so alive.įortunately, seven of her large, blue and white canvases are on permanent exhibition at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico. Having seen one of her works, one longs to see others. Despite an apparently constrained format, the undeniable hand of the artist, in pencil or in paint, is one of the most poignant aspects of her work. Here we can see the mark of her hand even at a distance the lines have a softness, because Martin worked quickly to avoid drips in the fast-drying paint. Later, she might fill in bands of color in acrylic paint (with characteristic humor, she once called herself “the queen of acrylic”). Martin painted her signature linear and grid images by working from top to bottom, using a system of mathematically spaced dots at the top of the canvas to guide her. At a glance, the surfaces appear to have been rendered mechanically, but upon closer inspection, the evidence of Martin’s hand is everywhere.
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In other works, freed from the constraints of a strict grid, she drew and painted horizontal bands, sometimes executing them extremely tightly, sometimes more loosely, drawing line after line directly on a lightly gessoed or painted background with a ruler. Early in her career, she painted grids in which each square was filled with dots, or even nail heads. Her paintings are nearly all made up of straight lines and squares-and yet these apparently rigid forms, varying in size and medium, provide her all the tools she needs. PAINTER AGNES MARTIN, who died in Taos, New Mexico, in 2004, had the ability to make seemingly restrictive, minimalist forms pulse with life. All images © 2009 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society, New York.