“All I want is a greater awareness of reality – joy and innocence.”
Agnes Martin, 1977

The present two lots, Untitled works on paper from 1977, feature horizontal stripes rendered in graceful colorful washes of pink, yellow and blue separated by fine graphite lines, were created by Martin after a period of six years during which she abstained from making any artwork, a hiatus that ended with the artist’s 1973 retrospective at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. In watercolor and graphite that hover upon nearly translucent sheets of thin paper, the present lots are emblematic of Martin’s radical interpretations of the landscape surrounding the artist in New Mexico. Her meditative and spiritual lines stretch across the sheets of paper like the rolling sand dunes of the desert and the enveloping sky, persistent and brilliant in color, light, and form. The artist recalls these compositions as about “light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form." (Agnes Martin in Agnes Martin: The Nineties and Beyond, exh. cat., The Menil Collection, Houston, 2002, pp. 14-15)

The optical, linear fields of delicate watercolor melt into an ethereal composition. Thoughts and memories seem to come in and out of focus, touching upon the viewers’ exposed sensory perception. As the artist relays, “The value of art is in the observer…People who look at my painting say that it makes them happy…And happiness is the goal, isn’t it?” (Agnes Martin in Holland Cotter, “Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92,” The New York Times, December 17, 2004)