Untitled #7
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Untitled #7
Maker
Agnes Martin
(b. 1912, Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada – d. 2004, Taos, New Mexico)
Date1992
MediumAcrylic on canvas
Dimensions72 in. x 72 in. (182.9 cm x 182.9 cm)
Credit LineGift of the American Art Foundation in honor of Nannerl O. Keohane (Class of 1961)
Object number1993.15
Status
Not on viewRightsCopyright is retained in accordance with U.S. Copyright laws
Photo creditDavis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
More InformationEducated at Columbia University in New York and at the University of New Mexico, Martin is associated with Minimalism, yet the spiritual and philosophical qualities she attributed to her work set her somewhat aside. The grid is essential—as is its painstaking, hand-wrought rendering and understated color. This square canvas includes a subtle palette and markings of the artist’s hand that belie the formal rigidity of the grid. In her groundbreaking essay “Originality of the Avant-Garde,” art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss ’62 theorized the grid and its “near ubiquity” in the avant-gardes of Europe and America, citing the gridded surface as the “image of an absolute beginning.” For Martin, as the artist herself remarks, the works are “light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down forms.”