Now nearly 90, Agnes Martin has been an unwavering presence at the still centre of a hurricane which has blown through American art for more than half a century. Yet despite many museum shows in cities around the world, her only major appearances in London have been in 1977 at the Hayward and in 1993 at the Serpentine Gallery.

The nine, stunning, light-filled paintings, each 60'' square, which make up this exhibition, were all painted since Agnes Martin's retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1992. They evoke that state of happiness in which we can perceive and experience the perfection within life. They have titles such as Faraway Love, Happy Holiday and Drift of Summer. Martin has written: All art work is about beauty. All positive work represents it and celebrates it. All negative art protests the lack of beauty in our lives.

Using precise, but intuitive marks within the discipline of a simple, abstract composition, she continues to develop and question ideas which have preoccupied her all her life. These are ideas about what it means to be an artist, about the function of art, about the necessity for solitude and freedom from everyday social mores, ideas about inspiration, ideas about the intensity of absolute beauty and about the happiness experienced by the mind emptied of ego. Seeking what she likes to call the "untroubled mind", her paintings are an exploration, an adventure within the mind, and an overcoming of the fear which accompanies this journey.

Martin's philosophical and aesthetic direction began in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan in Canada under the influence of her maternal grandfather, a devout Presbyterian. Later she was influenced by the egalitarianism of the American people, the writings of William Blake, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.

Her work transcends generations and joins them together. In the Forties and Fifties, as a student and an art teacher, having become an American citizen, Agnes Martin became aware of the American avant-garde and grew interested in the work of Newman and Rothko. She found her mature style in the late 1950s when she moved to New York and lived at Coenties Slip, at the same time as Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, and Jack Youngerman, where she also became acquainted with Johns and Rauschenberg. By the late Sixties, the next generation of Minimalist artists, Andre, LeWitt, Ryman, Marden and others, found much to admire in her vision of an immaterial pervasive reality of the mind beyond the world of appearances.

In 1967, loss of her studio, success and the need for solitude led Agnes Martin to abandon New York and cease painting for a number of years. After a period of travelling, she settled in New Mexico, which she first visited in 1946, where she lived in the 1950s and where she continues to make her home.

Although nature and solitude have played a large part in Agnes Martin's life, her work is not specifically about "nature". On the contrary, she has emphasised that it is "anti-nature". It is what is known forever in the mind. Elsewhere she has said: My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything - no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn't think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you don't encounter anything. A world without objects, without interruption, making a work without interruption, or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of the simple direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.

Opening hours: Monday to Friday 10am - 5.30pm; Saturday 10am - 1pm


For further information and images, please contact Jennifer Thatcher

Tel: 020 7499 4100 Fax: 020 7493 4443 email: jennifer_thatcher@doffay.com


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