BRICE MARDEN

Presented in Paris, the exhibition pays tribute to Marden’s long ties to the city. It was during his stay in Paris in 1964 that the artist furthered his interest in depicting a place through a kind of abstract reasoning. He created gridded monochrome works using charcoal rubbings of the tiled walls in the home where he stayed. It’s an intuitive leap that is both esoteric and practical—a literal recording of his environment.

Marden became one of the most inventive recorders of the natural world, its appearance, its textures, its poetry. He worked in studios overlooking the Hudson River, on the tropical Caribbean island of Nevis, in Morocco, in Pennsylvania—each providing its own unique, natural palette. Most of all, Marden was attuned to visual pleasure and became a colorist in the caliber of Matisse and Rothko. Rather than taking the conventional form of a landscape, his works evoke his environments through remembered impressions of a place, a river, a stone. A river contains reds and greens as well as blues. A stone contains yellows and oranges as well as grays. Color has a surface as well as a depth and the artist describes each with different gestures.

The gestures Marden developed in his practice reflected his immersion in the world of conceptual choreography—not only that a drawing comes about through gesture, but that light and color can dance. The perceived motion of light on water can resemble calligraphy or Cezanne’s brushstrokes or Pollock’s drips. As the poet John Ashbery wrote, Marden shows “the complexities hidden in what we thought to be elemental.”

Brice Marden: Works on Paper will be accompanied by a new publication. As Eileen Costello observes in her catalogue essay: ”[Marden’s] drawings have a personal feeling, which is the result of hand merging with mind: both need to become one.”