Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings draws primarily from Dia’s extensive collection of Martin’s canvases to focus on the breadth of the artist’s output during the 1950s and ’60s, complemented by important works from the latter decades of her practice, as well as significant loans. 

Charting Martin’s transition from quasi-organic abstraction to the graphite grid, this selection illuminates how she developed her approach to creating highly considered, delicately balanced compositions, which progressed slowly and iteratively over time. Key examples of her use of the grid—a distinctly reduced compositional device, rigorously yet meditatively articulated with hand-drawn lines—demonstrate how Martin expanded and refined her Minimal vocabulary over the course of the 1960s. A series of works created post-1974, following a painting hiatus of several years, encompass the range of compositions and palettes she adopted in that period, from horizontal bands and luminous acrylic washes to the return of geometric forms and her final “black” canvases. Martin’s evolution over the course of five decades articulates her refusal of painting as a product-driven practice but as a way of existing in the world.

Returning her work to Dia Beacon’s galleries for the first time in nearly a decade, this exhibition offers a renewed opportunity to view Martin’s singular contributions to Minimalism in the context of her conceptually like-minded peers.

In 1967, Agnes Martin painted Tundra, a monochromatic canvas divided by three graphite lines to form six rectangles. A culmination of her grid-based work over the decade prior, this pivotal painting is one of the artist’s most evacuated compositions. Fittingly, it also signaled her imminent withdrawal from painting, at least as a physical activity, until 1974. After creating Tundra, Martin departed New York and eventually settled in New Mexico, where for several years she cultivated mindfulness in solitude and in close relation to nature. Rather than a cessation, this hiatus reflects her definition of art as something beyond material output, in her words: “Painting is not making paintings; it is a development of awareness. And with this awareness, your work changes, but very slowly.”

Martin’s paintings embody refusal, not only through the negation of imagery but also through a retreat into the fundamental interiority of painting and the self. Positioned between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism—eschewing the first’s tendency for gestural excess and the latter’s often impersonal systems—her work pursues clarity of perception grounded in attention and calm, or “the untroubled mind,” as she called it. This presentation loosely charts the development of the artist’s rigorously reduced vocabulary, demonstrating how a constraint became a vehicle for iteration, discovery, and attunement.

Martin arrived at abstraction relatively late, with representation gradually yielding to organic and then geometric forms in the mid- to late 1950s, after she moved to New York and joined a radical artist community on Coenties Slip, along the East River. Whereas Untitled (ca. 1957) marks this transitional moment, its uniquely horizontal format alluding to a flat landscape, works such as Window (1957) abstract real-world apertures and architectures that inspired Martin and peers, including her then-neighbor Ellsworth Kelly. Two slender Untitled works (both ca. 1959) register an emergent grid and a haptic, process-oriented approach as graphite lines are incised into the paint, collapsing drawing and relief into a single surface. One of Martin’s few extant assemblages, The Wall #2 (1962) extends this tactility into three dimensions through the serial application of nails, reflecting the influence of Slip artists like Chryssa and Ray Johnson who often employed found materials.

Though Martin began centering geometric order in her work while in New York, she attributed her arrival at the grid to the natural world: “When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and then this grid came into my mind.” Works such as East River (1960), with its deep blue background and starkly contrasting lines, dramatize the tension between the city and nature as well as between the strict compositional method and the minute tremors of the hand. Meanwhile, paintings like Untitled (1960), translate perceptions of horizon and balance into geometric terms. While she often worked edge to edge, the artist also incorporated borders that activate the canvas’s periphery, exemplified by the tight, centrally framed grid in Wind (1961). With Tundra, the matrix both dissolves and expands; it disappears at one perspective and envelops at another.

In 1974, Martin returned to the studio with renewed clarity. Bands, lines, and measured hues continued to provide the conditions for endless variation; thus, the hiatus was not a lapse but a continuum. Geometric and symmetrical yet full of visible brushstrokes, the bands in this period’s paintings can be read as single axes of the grid, rather than an abandonment of it. Works made between 1975 and 2002 demonstrate the artist’s oscillation between subtle yet complex gray washes and luminous palettes—afforded by her transition from oil to acrylic—particularly in later paintings that channel the innocence and joy of youth, such as Little Child Responding to Love (2001). Near the end of her life, Martin reintroduced black into the canvases, harkening to dark palettes of early works like Untitled (ca. 1957) and Earth (1959) and pushing geometry toward new dimensions. In Homage to Life (2003), a tilted, viscous trapezoid is rendered portal-like; a composition folding into and beyond itself, it imagines an expansion beyond the limits of a grid, of a painting, of a life.

—Jordan Carter with Emily Markert

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