Brice Marden
“Let the painting make you”
New York, 980 Madison Avenue
The exhibition features a group of large paintings that Marden made in his studio in Tivoli, New York, in 2023, along with sixteen recent drawings that he made on the Caribbean island of Nevis and in Marrakech, Morocco. The paintings are characterized by weblike linear networks that cover variously colored grounds, and the group has a raw, spontaneous look, showing Marden drawing on intuition honed over a lifetime. These final works convey his idea of letting the paintings “make” us.
“One of the things about art is that it is full of contradictions. The only rule is there are no rules. But everybody works by rules. You set up your own rules.”
Marden was inspired by a broad range of art historical sources and spiritual traditions, and by experience gleaned through extensive travel. Allied with references to the natural world, these resources inspired an open-ended approach to painting through which he transformed earthly material into transcendent compositions of shape, color, and texture.
Brice Marden, Blue Painting, 2022–23 Oil on linen, 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm) © 2023 Estate of Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever
Marden worked on the six large paintings in the exhibition simultaneously for about a year, while confined to a wheelchair. The compositions’ relatively free look when compared to those in These paintings are of themselves, his previous exhibition at Gagosian, in 2021, resonates with earlier series, reflecting a longstanding alternation in his practice between more and less controlled approaches to the image. Marden completed Untitled, a work comprised of seven monochrome panels each painted a different single color, a few days before his passing on August 10.
Paul Galvez, in his catalogue essay, observes the way in which “any attempt at grounding, at secure focalization, is erased, overlapped, or canceled, all the better to ensnare every element in the flux of a planar web.” Tiffany Bell contextualizes this approach in terms of Marden “ending his conversations sooner, unveiling his layers of work. It is opening the door, allowing a closer look into his creative process. By willing himself to stop refining, towards the end of his career, we are seeing how it starts.”
