Untitled #6

Although Agnes Martin's reductive paintings have been keenly associated with the Minimalist movement, like Rothko she was an artist more akin to the Romantic tradition, who wished to create images of sublime perfection and simple beauty. Living an almost ascetic existence in New Mexico, she seemed to encapsulate a sense of the spirituality and tranquility of the desert and the big sky into her paintings. Always working within the regularity of a square format, she used the calm mathematical logic of the grid to strip down her compositions to the barest bones, her repeated horizontal lines suggesting an idealized notion of landscape. In her best work, the rigidness of geometrical order is counterbalanced at least by the humanity of the artist's touch, the softness of her almost invisible brushstrokes and the occasional hesitancy of her line. "I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds," stated Martin, "but that the paintings are very far from being perfect - completely removed in fact - even as we are ourselves."

The present work is an exquisite example of the quiet aesthetic and intimacy that Martin developed at the end of the 1990s. The tight structural divisions of her earlier pictures have given way to broader horizontal bands of gentle pastel hues. Her pale blues are not remote or cool, nor are her yellows hot. Martin uses washes of translucent and delicate color to dematerialize her surfaces and together with the tracery of soft graphite lines, she is able to produce a kind of ethereal radiance, as though light is actually emanating from behind the canvas itself. Martin brings a softer feminine aspect to the traditional masculinity of Minimalist pictorial construction.