• MINIMALISTS (1960s, 1970s) Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004) American Minimalist painter; hand - drawn
pencil grids on gesso, acrylics / oils.
Echoing the compositional elements of vertical and horizontal lines that were characteristic of Martin's work, the Dear Agnes series is comprised of hundreds
of pencil grid drawings in seemingly endless permutations.
Although made with materials traditionally used in design and drawing — the hand -
drawn pencil grid remains visible in the final image — these works are clearly paintings intended to test the boundaries of the medium.
For instance, her early mimetically painted images of flowers and birds, framed
by penciled grids, paint swatches, and tonal scales, struck me as an incisively beautiful study of the contradiction between image making and the physical reality of paint.
Important minimalists include Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004), noted
for pencil grids; and Ad Reinhardt (1913 - 67) noted for his black - on - black paintings.
The lines and dots became
large penciled grids, exactingly and laboriously handcrafted, overlaid with dabs of paint or gold leaf.
Between 1972 and 1979, the all - important
pencil grid in Barré's work is almost always laid out at a diagonal, while the paintings themselves are never tilted, emphasizing the fact that his grid, in contrast to Stella's, is never limited by the format of the stretcher.
It present works in different media and formats that used found objects and geometric shapes, before she began making her
visionary pencilled grids on large, square canvases.
Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004)(
Minimalist Pencil Grids on Monochrome Canvases)- Tremolo (1962, Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Martin's breakthrough came in the mid-1960s with a series of
simple pencil grids ruled directly onto gessoed canvases, of which the Modern Art Museum's Leaf, 1965, is a classic example.
As with Martin's
wavering penciled grids, intimacy is solicited by the «errors» Cook makes as he weaves the canvas.
Martin is most often associated with Minimalism, because of her use
of pencil grids and spare bands of muted color, but she spoke rapturously of the natural landscape and the emotive and expressive power of art in a very un-Minimalist way.
Back then Ryman could daub a canvas, leave it or
a pencil grid half exposed, switch to plastic or paper, mix in color, and incise his name and date into the paint.
Up close, one can see
a pencil grid, evidence of the artist's thought process in what looks most disordered and spontaneous.
In the 1930s he executed works based on photographs, squared up enlargements, where
the pencil grids were left still visible.
Agnes Martin's now familiar paintings of
pencil grids and subtle bands of color are the culmination of a personal search for artistic identity that led her from traditional still lifes and portraits to landscape paintings of the New Mexican desert through variations on Abstract Expressionism.
Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004) Minimalist painter, noted for
her pencilled grids.
In the early 1970s Barré returned to using brushes, embedding each composition in layers of transparent washes with subtle colors traversed by
a penciled grid, often laid out on a diagonal, implying a much larger, potentially infinite composition.
It can also take 30 years to understand why an all - white painting by Robert Ryman or
a pencil grid on canvas by Agnes Martin is art.
Corse's minimalist geometries may remind some viewers of Agnes Martin's
penciled grids, but they look different in every context.
A pencil grid dividing the canvas into two - inch squares is visible in the lower half of the painting.
«I set up the boards ahead of time with
these pencil grids.