Agnes Martin's "The Bluebird," Roswell Museum and Art Center Collection. This will be exhibited in "Agnes Martin: Before the Grid," opening Feb. 25, 2012 at the Harwood in Taos, N.M. AP Photo/Courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art.
A Taos museum is about to open an exhibit by an abstract painter who was a quiet fixture of the local community but who was well-known in the art world for her seemingly simple and muted grid paintings.
“Agnes Martin: Before the Grid” opens Feb. 25 at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. Martin, who died in 2004 at age 92, would have celebrated her 100th birthday in March.
Each of her paintings is a unique exercise in perfect scale and proportion. The show at the Harwood is the first large posthumous exhibit of her work and the only one to highlight such an extensive collection of paintings and drawings that predate the grids that made her famous.
It took a small team of curators about two years to unravel the mystery of her artistic beginnings. Playing detective, curators read through Martin’s letters, looked through film negatives, and searched public and private art collections. Because Taos artists often give some of their works to local schools, curators also approached the school district, and were able to find some of her work in a storage closet at a high school.
The rare pieces they uncovered in their various hunts are part of the show.
The hope is that the 30-plus oil portraits, watercolor landscapes and abstractions inspired by contemporaries like painter Mark Rothko will give visitors a better understanding of the evolution behind Martin’s style.
“You’ll be able to go upstairs and downstairs and you’ll wind your way through her mind. You’ll walk around the room and see her mind at work,” said curator Jina Brenneman.
“You’ll see how she actually came to arrive here,” Brenneman said, referring to “The Spring,” the show’s benchmark piece. “She was a gallery goer, she was a museum goer. She had a strong visual memory so she really, really was watching what was going on around her. She wasn’t just isolated in her adobe creating grid work. She was looking.”
You can read the full article via ArtDaily here.
