Agnes Martin's signature meditative abstractions feature grids and geometric shapes hand drawn on pale painted surfaces. While she is often compared to mid-20th-century Minimalist painters, Martin identified more with Abstract Expressionism in its singular concern with evoking effect.
Read MoreThe grid for which Martin would become famous emerged in the 1960s. Using a pencil, rulers, tape, and string, and by scratching into paint and gesso on square canvases, Martin created visual plains of repetition that produced a meditative effect exemplary in works such as Red Bird (1964), which features a barely-there red grid overlaid atop a buttery yellow ground. Given their pale tones, Martin works such as this are notoriously difficult to photograph.
While to Martin, grids conveyed innocence and serenity, she was adamant about rejecting further representation in her work. In an interview, she explained: 'My paintings are about merging, about formlessness ... A world without objects, without interruption.' While some works have simple titles, such as Stone (1964), Martin's preference, especially earlier on, was that her works remain unnamed, as she believed the painting, not the language surrounding it, should hold the experience.
Martin's inspiration for paintings came to her in visions, from which she drew postage stamp-sized versions before making painstaking calculations to scale them up to 72x72-inch canvases. Due to their all-over, sublime effect, Martin's paintings have often been described as having spiritual or meditative qualities. Indeed, like many American artists in the 1960s, Martin was influenced by Taoist and Zen Buddhist teachings.
Despite Martin's network with other influential artists of the time, including Bruce Nauman, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Indiana, and romantic relationships with artist Lenore Tawney and Greek sculptor Chryssa, her stay in New York would not last long.
In 1967, after a period of personal tumult (the artist was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as an adult), Martin packed up and returned to Taos, where she built a small dwelling and studio on a remote piece of land. After a long hiatus from painting, Martin resumed in the mid-1970s with printmaking, drawing, and a brief exploration of film.
Taking leave from the graphite grid that defined her New York paintings, these later works presented bolder geometric compositions such as the thick pink vertical bars of Untitled Number 5 (1975) and the horizontal bars of With My Back to the World (1997). They are also often characterised by the warm pastel palette of Martin's new arid desert surroundings.
Notably, towards the end of her life, stark geometric shapes reappeared in her works. Homage to Life (2003) features, a stark black trapezoid shape looming out of a tense putty grey wash.
Despite her distance from the epicentre of New York, Martin's work gained increasing recognition over the years. She died in 2004 at the age of 92 in Taos.
