Untitled by Agnes Martin

Provenance:
Acquired directly from the Artist
Private Collection, Montreal

Literature:
Dieter Schwarz, "Agnes Martin Writings", Ostfildern-Ruit, 2005, page 29

Born in Canada, Agnes Martin moved to New York at the invitation of New York City gallerist Betty Parsons in 1957, where she settled in Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan. There she became acquainted with some of the artists that Parsons represented, including Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman and Ad Reinhardt, among others.

A prolific artist and writer, Martin has described the importance of grids in her work: “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.”

A gift from the artist to the present owner, this rare early lithograph by Agnes Martin was created in the early 1960s when she began showing at the Robert Elkon Gallery in New York. Even when the medium of the lithograph is employed, as in the present lot, Martin’s minimalist abstract grid carries the same intentions as in any of her larger canvases.