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Auktionsarchiv: Los-Nr. 20

Agnes Martin

Schätzpreis
4.000.000 $ - 6.000.000 $
Zuschlagspreis:
3.946.000 $
Auktionsarchiv: Los-Nr. 20

Agnes Martin

Schätzpreis
4.000.000 $ - 6.000.000 $
Zuschlagspreis:
3.946.000 $
Beschreibung:

20 Property from a Distinguished American Collection Agnes Martin Untitled #1 signed and dated "a. martin 1985" on the reverse gesso, acrylic and graphite on canvas 72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm.) Executed in 1985.
Provenance Pace Gallery, New York Waddington Galleries, London Christie's, New York, November 20, 1996, lot 50 Stephen Friedman Gallery, London Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited New York, Pace Gallery, Agnes Martin New Paintings, September 19 - October 25, 1986 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Museum Wiesbaden; Munich, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Agnes Martin Paintings and Drawings, March 22, 1991 - January 6, 1992, pp. 125, 159 (illustrated) Literature Nancy Grimes, "New York Reviews: Agnes Martin Pace," Art News, no. 85, December 1986, p. 140 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.” There is hardly a more mysterious tone than gray, and gray became the focus of Agnes Martin’s paintings throughout the 1980s. Abandoning her earlier gridded canvases in favor of uninterrupted vertical and horizontal bands, Martin began executing works embodying an ethereal, evanescent beauty in varying shades of gray. Untitled #1 from 1985 is a stunning example of her aesthetic of this time. Indeed, it is such an exemplar of these mid-1980s works that it was included in Martin’s major travelling exhibition, which travelled from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam through to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in honor of her being awarded the inaugural Alexej von Jawlensky Prize in 1990. Broad, evenly spaced bands of deep, slate-gray alternate with those of a lighter, more cloud-like quality, synthesizing a hypnotic composition of line and form and shade. Martin’s specific process of mixing acrylic with gesso at once lends her work a matte tonality and adds a particular luminescence to the painting. Executed in her standard format (for this time period) of a 72 x 72 inch square – a size which Martin specifically chose for its particularly human scale – the painting seems to hover in space, a sort of portal into an indeterminate emotional landscape. The distinct linearity of the composition coupled with its particularly unsubstantiated palette causes the painting to flicker before the viewer, a constant push/pull of focus and haze, a perpetual flux between knowing what is real and what is imagined, what is emotion and what is intellect, what is seen and what is innately understood. Landscape is evoked everywhere in Martin’s oeuvre: the orientation of the work suggests the horizon that demarcates the open skies from the vast expanses of desert; the coloring is reminiscent of cool dawns and damp river clay; the gravelly texture effects the touch of sand. One imagines the artist looking over the New Mexico landscape, inspired by the incandescent and austere quietude of her surroundings. However, those surroundings, while implicit in her work, were not what it was “about” per se. "A lot of people say that my work is like landscape. But the truth is that it isn't, because there are no straight lines in nature. My work is non-objective, like that of the abstract expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at a landscape so I never protest when they say my work is like a landscape. But it's really about a feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in a landscape" (Agnes Martin quoted in Irving Sandler interview, Art Monthly, no. 169, September, 1993). These formal qualities of her painting and drawing manifest Martin’s specific spirituality. Martin thought of geometry as an appropriate vehicle for spiritual content and her manipulation of the logic of geometry served a higher pursuit of a classical perfection, which the artist considered absent from nature and held only in the mind. The painting’s orderly composition is guided by objective standards and particular rules – mathematical to be precise. Ever enigmatic, and yet find

Auktionsarchiv: Los-Nr. 20
Auktion:
Datum:
18.05.2017
Auktionshaus:
Phillips
New York
Beschreibung:

20 Property from a Distinguished American Collection Agnes Martin Untitled #1 signed and dated "a. martin 1985" on the reverse gesso, acrylic and graphite on canvas 72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm.) Executed in 1985.
Provenance Pace Gallery, New York Waddington Galleries, London Christie's, New York, November 20, 1996, lot 50 Stephen Friedman Gallery, London Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited New York, Pace Gallery, Agnes Martin New Paintings, September 19 - October 25, 1986 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Museum Wiesbaden; Munich, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Agnes Martin Paintings and Drawings, March 22, 1991 - January 6, 1992, pp. 125, 159 (illustrated) Literature Nancy Grimes, "New York Reviews: Agnes Martin Pace," Art News, no. 85, December 1986, p. 140 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.” There is hardly a more mysterious tone than gray, and gray became the focus of Agnes Martin’s paintings throughout the 1980s. Abandoning her earlier gridded canvases in favor of uninterrupted vertical and horizontal bands, Martin began executing works embodying an ethereal, evanescent beauty in varying shades of gray. Untitled #1 from 1985 is a stunning example of her aesthetic of this time. Indeed, it is such an exemplar of these mid-1980s works that it was included in Martin’s major travelling exhibition, which travelled from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam through to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in honor of her being awarded the inaugural Alexej von Jawlensky Prize in 1990. Broad, evenly spaced bands of deep, slate-gray alternate with those of a lighter, more cloud-like quality, synthesizing a hypnotic composition of line and form and shade. Martin’s specific process of mixing acrylic with gesso at once lends her work a matte tonality and adds a particular luminescence to the painting. Executed in her standard format (for this time period) of a 72 x 72 inch square – a size which Martin specifically chose for its particularly human scale – the painting seems to hover in space, a sort of portal into an indeterminate emotional landscape. The distinct linearity of the composition coupled with its particularly unsubstantiated palette causes the painting to flicker before the viewer, a constant push/pull of focus and haze, a perpetual flux between knowing what is real and what is imagined, what is emotion and what is intellect, what is seen and what is innately understood. Landscape is evoked everywhere in Martin’s oeuvre: the orientation of the work suggests the horizon that demarcates the open skies from the vast expanses of desert; the coloring is reminiscent of cool dawns and damp river clay; the gravelly texture effects the touch of sand. One imagines the artist looking over the New Mexico landscape, inspired by the incandescent and austere quietude of her surroundings. However, those surroundings, while implicit in her work, were not what it was “about” per se. "A lot of people say that my work is like landscape. But the truth is that it isn't, because there are no straight lines in nature. My work is non-objective, like that of the abstract expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at a landscape so I never protest when they say my work is like a landscape. But it's really about a feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in a landscape" (Agnes Martin quoted in Irving Sandler interview, Art Monthly, no. 169, September, 1993). These formal qualities of her painting and drawing manifest Martin’s specific spirituality. Martin thought of geometry as an appropriate vehicle for spiritual content and her manipulation of the logic of geometry served a higher pursuit of a classical perfection, which the artist considered absent from nature and held only in the mind. The painting’s orderly composition is guided by objective standards and particular rules – mathematical to be precise. Ever enigmatic, and yet find

Auktionsarchiv: Los-Nr. 20
Auktion:
Datum:
18.05.2017
Auktionshaus:
Phillips
New York
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