AGNES MARTIN (1912-2004) STARS signed "a. ma

PROPERTY OF AN AMERICAN COLLECTOR

Provenance
Robert Elkon Gallery, NEW YORK
Mary Boone Gallery, NEW YORK

Exhibited
NEW YORK, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, AMERICAN DRAWINGS, September-October 1964, n.p., no. 78 (illustrated titled "STARS" in exhibition catalogue)

MY WORK IS ANTI-NATURE THE FOUR-STORY MOUNTAIN YOU WILL NOT THINK FORM, SPACE LINE, CONTOUR JUST A SUGGESTION OF NATURE GIVES WEIGHT LIGHT AND HEAVY LIGHT LIKE A FEATHER YOU GET LIGHT ENOUGH AND YOU LEVITATE
A. Martin, "The Untroubled Mind, "AGNES MARTIN,PHILADELPHIA, Institute of Contemporary Art, 1973, p. 17

THROUGHOUT HER PROLIFIC CAREER, AGNES MARTIN EXAMINED AND EXPERIMENTED WITH MULTIPLE STYLES IN HER SEARCH TO DISCOVER HER OWN ARTISTIC IDENTITY. BY 1963, AFTER HAVING EXPLORED ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, PORTRAITURE AND LANDSCAPE PAINTING, SHE ARRIVED AT HER NOW MOST RECOGNIZABLE GRID PATTERN. THE GRID PATTERN THAT MARTIN ARRIVED AT MOST COMPLETELY CAPTURED WHAT SHE TERMED AS 'SUBLIMITY OF REALITY, PERFECTION OR TRANSCENDENT REALITY.'
B. Haskell, AGNES MARTIN,NEW YORK, p. 91

Over the course of her prolific career one the main underpinnings present in Agnes Martin's work is her sensitivity to the "ideal sense of humanness." Richard Tuttle states that through her painting style, "she is saying what a human being is is something that is free of nature" (Richard Tuttle taken from "Tuttle on Martin" in Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, eds., AGNES MARTIN/RICHARD TUTTLE, FORT WORTH, 1998, p. 10). What Tuttle describes as"free of nature" is not necessarily separation fromnature but the attainment of a connection with nature on a level that is outside of the immediate physical realm. This transcendent communion with nature is ever present in her work. In the present lot the gossamer application of blue watercolor and the delicate ink marks and lines surrounding and criss-crossing the paper in structured patterns elicit the analogy of this work to the vast open landscapes of both her Saskatchewanese youth and New Mexican maturity. Lawrence Alloway elaborates on this idea with the statement "we perceive a grid, but…we recognize a form of nature imagery" (AGNES MARTIN, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1973, p. 10).

Her experience is monumentalized: absolutely holistic, the present work is without hierarchy or center absolutely universal it reduces all experience, however varied, to a unitary system of notation. Like Piet Mondrian's famous "Pluses and Minuses," so too Martin's celebrated grids. "I drew them just as perfectly as I could, I didn't think at all about my hand, but in nature it is impossible to make a pefect line, so the lines have that lack of perfection. The composition carries it" (Serpentine Gallery, p. 13). Martin expounds on this notion, "people say my work is like landscape. But the truth is that it isn't…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 feeling they experience when they look at landscape so I never protest…my response to nature is really a response to beauty. The water looks beautiful, the trees look beautiful, even the dust" (AGNES MARTIN: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS 19771991, LONDON, 1993, p. 13)

The final destination on her remarkable journey of self-exploration as an artist–as well as an individual–is a body of work that is a tangible manifestation of a state of consciousness. This painting serves as a seminal example of her artistic legacy, one of many markers along a path of artistic discovery gently blazed by Martin in the hope of leading us to the sublime revelation of our place within nature.