PREVIEW: Brice Marden-Let The Painting Make You

Brice Marden has had a profound impact on painting today. While there has been a sea change in Art Movements, Marden has unwaveringly adhered to modernist principles of abstraction. From his early monochrome paintings to landscapes of China or the Greek Island Hydra, he composed of vivid and calligraphic loops and webs, Marden’s deeply personal work incorporates multiple art historical and cultural inspirations.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

The exhibition “Let the painting make you” features a group of large paintings that Brice 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. 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. 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.”

Photo: 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, Courtesy Estate of Brice Marden & Gagosian

Info; Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison AvenueNew York, NY, USA, Duration: 2/11-22/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18;00, https://gagosian.com/