Agnes Martin
Quiet painter of grids.
Agnes Martin painted pale, square canvases with pencil grids and faint bands of colour. She spoke of happiness and innocence.
Agnes Martin was born in 1912 in Macklin, Saskatchewan, in Canada and grew up in Vancouver. She moved to the United States and studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. For many years she worked as a teacher while slowly feeling her way as an artist, among other places in Taos, New Mexico.
In 1957 the gallerist Betty Parsons persuaded her to move to New York. She lived at Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, close to artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana. There she found her form: square canvases, often just under two metres a side, covered with fine pencil grids over a pale ground. The lines are drawn by hand and tremble slightly. Her art is often classed as Minimalism, but she saw herself as an Abstract Expressionist.
In 1967 she abruptly stopped painting, left New York and travelled around North America for a long time. She eventually settled in New Mexico. Only in the early 1970s did she start working again, now often with soft horizontal bands in pale colours such as pink, light blue and yellow. She suffered from schizophrenia and was periodically hospitalised, something she spoke openly about only late in life.
Martin drew on Zen Buddhism and Taoism. She held that her paintings were about joy, innocence and beauty, about feelings one can experience when looking at nature but which are not nature itself. She also wrote texts on art and inspiration. In 1997 she received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale.
She died in 2004 in Taos at the age of 92. Her quiet paintings have grown steadily in importance and are now seen as some of the most meditative works in post-war American art.