Love

Since moving to her current home in Taos, New Mexico in 1993, Agnes Martin reduced the scale of her signature 72 x 72 inch square format to 60 x 60 inch square paintings, which elicits an altogether different visual affect, something that is regarded as more intimate. The latter format of paintings plays with the tension between the viewer's perceptual grasp of the painting as an image to behold on the wall versus the desire to comprehend the painting as a doorway to enter an otherwordly "realm." The second development is a modifcation, if not a refinement, of Martin's square grid format. In Love, one views the delicate horizontal striations of graphite and washes of pale blue acrylic tempered by gesso. It is an image of living perfection; the touch of the artist is evident in the way the lines meet or sometimes not meet the edges of the canvas. This visual phenomenon creates an almost imperceptible "swelling" in the middle of the painting, a sense of plentitude and expansion. Although the graphite lines are made with the assistance of a ruler, Martin's hand seem to have intuitively marked the canvas.

"For more than five decades, Martin has created paintings that are evocations of light, each an individual issuance of ethereal rhythms. Simultaneously powerful and gentle, they are spartan works, beautiful without the slightest adornment. The paintings that Martin has offered us with unstinting consistency are pictures of anything. They are cadences of light, form, and color." (N. Rifkin, Agnes Martin: The Nineties and Beyond, Houston, exh. cat., 2002, p. 28).