"People think that painting is about color
It's mostly composition
It's composition that's the whole thing"
Agnes Martin
Emptied of image, narrative and “meaning” in any conventional sense, the present two Untitled paintings, both executed in the twilight of Agnes Martin’s career, are nonetheless expansive in their evocation of beauty, peace, happiness and a spiritual sublime. These two works wonderfully embody the expressiveness within minimal means that is a hallmark of Martin's corpus and which stands as her most influential contribution to the discourse on the nature of painting. Manifesting itself as an intellectual balancing act, with a grace and integrity that verges on the transcendent, Martin’s art constitutes a prolonged and fully investigated dissertation into the very nature of abstract painting.
Painted after her move to Taos in New Mexico, the softly colored, almost translucent bands are reminiscent of the ethereal desert light in which she was working. The vast expanse of the empty landscape, where the horizon and sky merge almost imperceptibly, became the inspiration for her work, with her use of color exploring the physical properties of the light spectrum, rather than the objects of color themselves. “Color in Martin's late paintings serves a function comparable to that of formal design or composition. The way she deploys color alludes to the workings of light rather than to objects of color. Her pale blues are not remote and cool, nor are her yellows hot. Because the paint is diluted acrylic and combines with the chalky whites of her gesso, Martin's colors both absorb and reflect light. This unusual way of handling color, as if to impart a feel or an ‘aroma’ rather than to create temperature or to mimic naturalistic color, characterizes much of Martin's work over the past several years. Her hues, so masterfully washy, are liquid intimations of color. They are also fields of space that recede and advance in relation to one another.” (Ned Rifkin, Agnes Martin—The Music of the Spheres from Agnes Martin: the Nineties and Beyond, exh. cat., The Menil Collection, Houston, 2002, p. 26)
These works present a portal into Martin’s unique spiritual sensibility, and yet are born of a tightly regulated system: emotional verve impeccably and intriguingly obfuscated by an exquisitely structured façade. In the present paintings, the tenets of composition and perspective are stripped down to their essentials, the stunning result being the achievement of unclouded aesthetic serenity. The artist’s gentle manipulation of the logic of geometry and classical perfection contrasts with the solidity of her pictorial structure. By employing Minimalist abstraction not as a clinical device, but rather as a means of revelation, she achieves a perfection of the surface that engenders beauty, calm, and self-reflection in the viewer.
Martin wanted her work to be about a transcendent experience. Her philosophy centered on a sense of faith, yet her ideas are not to be confused with religion. She was able to see perfection in life and believed that beauty expressed that perfection; she noted, "When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection. […] The function of art work is the stimulation of sensibilities, the renewal of memories of moments of perfection.” (Agnes Martin quoted in Agnes Martin, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2015, pp. 158, 235)