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 on different formats of grid structures. 

Reflection (1959) is characteristic of this period. It was included in the artist’s second show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City (December 1959 – January 1960). The vertical format of this painting on canvas depicts five rows of three white circles against a dark background. The grid structure allowed Martin to develop her geometric analysis while preserving a spare, refined visual language. For the artist, abstraction became a means to depict subtle emotions, such as the ones we feel when we experience the natural world. Her canvases invite the viewer to meditate on the beauty of elementary forms.

The Pinault Collection showed this work for the first at the Icones exhibition at Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2023