Press release
From January 21 to March 5, 1994, seven paintings by the American artist Agnes Martin will be exhibited in the rooms of the Michael Werner Gallery.
The 81-year-old artist lives and works in seclusion in New Mexico. She was honored last year by a retrospective traveling exhibition that began at the Whitney Museum in New York and made other stops throughout the U.S., finally ending at the Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid.
The seven paintings exhibited at the Michael Werner Gallery were created between 1985, 1990 and 1991. Always square, the paintings are structured by fine horizontal graphite lines. The seeming colors, washed out pale, make the painting seem transparent. An association of light and atmosphere is created, which conveys lightness, weightlessness compared to the strict geometry of the square and the lines. The horizontally lined paintings are reminiscent of a hazy sea horizon, with dissolved contours that transform into lines. Quote Agnes Martin:
"My paintings have neither object nor space nor lines or anything else - no forms. They are light. Lightness, they are about merging, about formlessness, about dissolving form. Before the ocean, you wouldn't think of form."
The pictures are the result of an intensive, moving painting process. With an intensity Agnes Martin pursues day after day incessantly a pictorial idea. In this unwaveringness arise ascetic images of unusual purity and freed from any excess.