Agnes Martin

Agnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter celebrated for her minimalist approach and contributions to Abstract Expressionism.

Biography of Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin was born in 1912 in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada. She spent her early childhood in Saskatchewan, which influenced her work throughout her life. As a young adult, she moved to the United States, first to Bellingham, Washington, in 1931, then to New York in 1941, and finally to Albuquerque, where she studied painting at the University of New Mexico from 1946 to 1948.

She returned to New York in 1951 to earn a master's degree at the Teachers College at Columbia University. During this period, she developed an interest in Buddhist thought. Her fascination with Eastern philosophy evolved alongside her admiration for Abstract Expressionism, culminating in paintings distinguished by biomorphic shapes and geometric abstraction. These elements were refined into an earthy palette featuring beiges, greens, grays, and creams.

In 1954, Martin moved to New Mexico, settling in Taos. She received a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in 1955, which allowed her to produce one hundred paintings in a year.

After a studio visit with art dealer Betty Parsons, Martin was persuaded to return to New York in 1957. Soon after settling into a loft in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, Martin connected with neighboring artists including Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist. This period marked the beginning of her affiliation with the Betty Parsons Gallery, where she held her first solo exhibition in 1958.

Throughout the 1960s, Martin participated in several notable exhibitions, including those at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art.

Despite her successes, Martin sought solitude and chose to stop painting, leaving New York in 1967. She spent eighteen months traveling across the United States and Canada. Eventually, she resettled in New Mexico, where she devoted herself to writing prose on art and life.

In 1973, she had her first one-artist museum exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She returned to painting in 1975 with an exhibition at Pace Gallery, marking three decades of prolific work.

In 1991, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam hosted a retrospective of her work, followed by a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992.

Agnes Martin spent the last years of her life in Taos, New Mexico, where she continued to paint until her death in 2004.

Agnes Martin's Art Style

Agnes Martin was a highly influential painter of her time, leaving a lasting impact on the history of modern and contemporary art. While exploring the transcendent possibilities of painting, Martin was contemporaneous with the Abstract Expressionists and aligned her work with their movement. However, her body of work also played a pivotal role in ushering in the era of Minimalism.

In addition to a couple of self-portraits and a few watercolor landscapes, Martin's early works featured biomorphic paintings in muted colors created from 1955 to 1957. However, she actively sought and destroyed paintings from her early years when she started exploring abstraction.

Her distinctive style was characterized by a focus on lines, grids, and fields of exceptionally delicate colors. Especially during her breakthrough years in the early 1960s, she produced 6 × 6 foot square canvases adorned with dense, minutely detailed graphite grids.

Although minimalist in form, these paintings differed significantly in spirit from those of her minimalist peers, retaining small imperfections and unmistakable traces of the artist's hand. She avoided intellectualism, instead emphasizing the personal and spiritual aspects. Due to the growing prominence of the spiritual dimension in her work after 1967, she preferred to be associated with Abstract Expressionism.

After relocating to Taos, where she resided and worked for the rest of her life, she scaled down her canvases from six-foot squares to a slightly smaller five-foot size. In her final decade, she introduced a new array of colors into her paintings, including various shades of green and a rich orange. Towards the end of her artistic career, she revisited geometric elements last seen in her works from the 1950s, juxtaposing dark black triangles and squares on ethereal gray backgrounds, while maintaining the enduring presence of graphite lines—a hallmark of her oeuvre.

Defined by stark lines and grids overlaid on subdued backgrounds, Martin’s paintings gracefully explore the interplay of structure, space, craftsmanship, and the metaphysical.