ARTIST ROOMS: Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday  1999

Martin applied an opaque base coat of white acrylic gesso (or primer) to this work. The gesso was overlaid with stripes of diluted blue and peach acrylic paint. The layered application of materials creates a translucent and light-reflecting finish. The bands of colour don’t quite reach the edges of the canvas. The small gaps create the impression that the blue and peach washes are floating against the bright, white background.

Gallery label, January 2020

Agnes Martin, Faraway Love  1999

Refined over many decades, Martin’s distinctive late style was characterised by her use of uniform size canvases and horizontal bands of pale luminous colour divided by hand-drawn lines. She refused to identify with a particular faith, but believed in art as a realm of transcendent experience, and said, ‘Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not just in the eye. It is in the mind. It is our positive response to life.’

Gallery label, October 2016

Agnes Martin, Untitled #5  1994

Untitled #5 is a large abstract painting on canvas by the Canadian–American artist Agnes Martin, signed and inscribed by the artist on its verso. The square pictorial field is divided into eleven horizontal bands of white, blue and peach acrylic paint. The colours alternate in a regular pattern and the divisions are demarcated by wavering graphite pencil lines. As with all works from this period by Martin, Untitled #5 was begun by priming the entire surface of the canvas with an opaque coating of white acrylic gesso, which is never fully covered by subsequent layers of colour. This gives the painting a visual sparseness and vibrant luminosity; the thick white gesso sealing and emphasising the slightly toothy texture of the linen canvas support. On top of this base coat of paint the artist measured out and marked with pencil rectangular bands across the width of the canvas, into which she painted alternating duck-egg blue and pale peach ‘salmon-brick’ colours using a different type of acrylic, Liquitex, which gives a translucent and tempera-like finish. These same colours appear in the later paintings Faraway Love 1999 (Tate AR00178) and Happy Holiday 1999 (Tate AR00179), but in Untitled #5 they are applied with lighter, looser brush strokes and the Liquitex was diluted to produce almost gestural veils of colour. Within the composition’s repeating horizontals, the three bands left empty of colour are also the widest, at approximately one and a half times the width of the peach and blue bands. This irregularity reinforces the white gesso’s role as a blank background onto which colours and pencil marks have been inscribed. The painting was completed by further reinforcement of the pencil lines demarcating the striped surface of the canvas. By drawing on top of the acrylic paints, Martin reverses the traditional notion of drawing as preparatory work to be painted over. These strong, persistent horizontal lines are the final addition to the work, and are drawn so as not to reach the edge of the canvas, creating the impression that they are floating across the colour field. Explaining her drawing technique, the artist stated in an interview with the critic Joan Simon that:

Agnes Martin, Untitled #5  1991

Before 1993, Martin consistently used a six-foot (2 metre) square canvas for her paintings. This size appealed to her for its enveloping relationship with the viewer’s body. She saw it as ‘a size you can walk into’. The large canvas became increasingly difficult to handle as Martin grew older. She made the decision to reduce the size to a five-foot (1.5 metre) square. This canvas still takes up most of the viewer’s visual field, allowing them to absorb the subtle variations in line, tone and texture without distraction.

Gallery label, January 2020