Blue-Gray Composition

Blue-Grey Composition represents a pivotal period in Agnes Martin’s production, between the more fluid style of her early work and the ethereal geometric visions that would later occupy her. Martin was careful to meticulously destroy her works prior to the 1960s. The few surviving older works provide a record of the organic pictorial language that characterized her work of the 1950s, marked by the use of biomorphic shapes and expressive colors.

Blue-Grey Composition captures an intermediate stage before her later experiments with the grid motif and a refined geometric style, which she first presented in an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1961, and from which she would not deviate until her death. Although the rectilinear vocabulary of this painting announces this evolution, the organic form in the center of the painting recalls her use of curved lines in her earlier work. Evoking an opening, like a slit leading to a pictorial beyond, this central shape enters into tension with the taut lines that unfold at the upper and lower ends of the canvas, while maintaining a harmonious balance between the different parts of the composition. Animated by a deep spirituality, Martin explained that she was interested “in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed […] in artwork which is also wordless and silent.”1 R.G.
1 — Agnes Martin, Writings (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 89.