Untitled

When Agnes Martin moved to New York City in 1957, she decided to devote herself entirely to painting. She was 45 years old at the time. She reinvented her visual vocabulary by abandoning her previous biomorphic abstractions and focusing on exploring simple geometric forms and different formats of grid structures. She covered her canvases with orthogonal lines applied at regular intervals, thereby neutralising any compositional principles. In pursuit of a deeply spiritual perfection, Martin managed to sublimate the irregularity of the human gesture. 

This square-shaped work on paper consists of an overlay of thin, obliquely drawn graphite lines.  Unlike the all-over format of her grid structures, these lines do not reach the edges, instead leaving a margin on each side of this sheet mounted on canvas. A vertical line drawn from top to bottom divides the space of this piece and doubles its rectilinear pattern. Through the purity of the lines, Agnes Martin invites us to discover the beauty that exists in what she termed each person’s “inner spirit”* rather than in objects. 

The Pinault Collection showed this work for the first at the Icones exhibition at Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2023. *« What Is Real? », dans Agnes Martin: Paintings and Drawings 1957-1975, Londres, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1977.