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Solol Art Museum Hosts 《Agnes Martin: Moments of Perfection》

■ Exhibition Overview

- Exhibition: Agnes Martin: Moments of Perfection

- Period: May 4 to August 25, 2024

- Venue: Exhibition Rooms 2 & 3

- Organizer: Korean Research Institute of Contemporary Art (KoRICA)

- Guest Curator: Frances Morris

“My [artworks] 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 this simple, direct going into a field of vision as you could cross and empty beach to look at the ocean.”

– 1966, Agnes Martin

On May 4, Solo Art Museum will kick off the exhibition Agnes Martin: Moments of Perfection. Agnes Martin (1912-2004) was a Canadian-born American woman artist who was one of the most important figures in American art in the 1950s and onward. Featuring 54 major works by Martin, the exhibition has been organized in collaboration with international collectors, including the Leeum Museum of Art, Osaka National Museum of Art and Nagoya City Art Museum in Japan, Whitney Museum of American Art and Dia Art Foundation in New York, Pace Gallery, and the George Economou Collection. The exhibition has also been organized with guest curator Frances Morris, Visiting Scholar at Ewha Womans University who served as the director of the Tate Modern Museum.

Agnes Martin: Moments of Perfection is the first exhibition in Korea showcasing the works of American artist Agnes Martin, who pursued pure abstraction. While at Columbia University, Martin was exposed to Zen Buddhism and Taoism, which greatly influenced her work. This was around the time when avant-garde experimental art and monochromatic painting were flourishing in Korea. This exhibition will examine Martin’s works from Eastern perspective, juxtaposing her experimental and meditative works with those of her Asian contemporaries and exploring the relationship and resonance between them.

This exhibition begins its exploration of Martin’s career in 1955 when she began to avoid figurative references from her compositions. Her paintings moved from organic and biomorphic shapes to a more formal and geometric language, often featuring circles, triangles, and rectangles. By the late 1950s, Martin had removed all figurative references from her compositions and was experimenting with various linear and grid shapes. The Tree (1964) is arguably among her most innovative and minimal works that highlight this transition.

In 1967, Martin stopped painting and left New York to travel. Then, she continued her work in seclusion in Taos, a small town in New Mexico, from 1974, and worked in much the same manner for three decades until her death in 2004. During this period, Martin found her imagery through the “inspirations” through meditation and depicted them in her paintings. In her pursuit of “perfection,” she meticulously planned the size, color, and technique of her works, filling the canvases with infinite repetitions and variations of color and lines.

On a Clear Day (1973), which is featured in this exhibition, marks an important transition in Martin’s career. An ensemble of thirty silkscreened works, On a Clear Day (1973) foreshadows the changes in form and content that her work would undergo in the years to come.

The gray monochrome paintings created between 1977 and 1992 are among the most enigmatic and beautiful of Martin’s entire oeuvre. The eight gray monochromes presented in the exhibition are an aesthetic climax, vividly revealing the boundless variations of form, color, and texture within the limits set by the artist.

Finally, the exhibition presents a series that Agnes Martin immersed herself in during the last decade of her life. In 1993, while living in a retirement home for health reasons, Martin continued to visit her studio every day and never put down her paintbrush. As her body weakened, however, she worked on a slightly reduced scale. Regarding Innocent Love, a series of eight paintings created in 1999, Martin said she painted images that were conceived during moments of quiet meditation. The Innocent Love series, which embodies translucent radiance, joy, and celebration unlike her gray monochromatic works, marks the end of Martin’s artistic journey.

Agnes Martin not only deeply moved the viewers with her artworks, but also produced exquisite written works that provided deep insight into life and art. This exhibition also highlights her literary sensibilities with her written works. In the Seminar Room, the documentary film With My Back to the World (2002) by Mary Lance, who visited Martin’s studio in 2002 and captured her unique and fascinating personality, will be screened.

Agnes Martin’s works offer the viewer an opportunity to look slowly. The viewer can slowly savor, in silence, the evidence of her meticulous process - the wash of color, the soft blurring of the edges, and the febrile touch of her pencil. Martin was reluctant to connect her work to personal experience, meaning, or insight into life, asserting that her works have nothing to do with her and that the value of art is in the observer, and she likened the experience of looking at her art to listening to music.

When she did comment on the experience of looking at a single work, she compared it to watching the ebb and flow of waves on the sea or the movement of the clouds across the sky, always changing but also essentially the same: repetitive, meditative, timeless, capable of generating happiness, of creating for Martin – and for the viewer – “moments of perfection.”

[Biography]

Agnes Martin, 1912~2004

Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912. She emigrated to the United States in 1931, where she studied and taught art in New York and Taos, New Mexico. After becoming a U.S. citizen in 1950, Martin began working as a painter and became one of the leading figures in the American art world from the 1960s onward, during which time she interacted with Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman. Pursuing pure abstraction, Martin’s work is often discussed in the context of Minimalism, but she refused to be categorized as a modernist.

From the late 1960s onward, she lived alone in New Mexico, where she developed her own colorful artistic language and pursued beauty and pure perfection in an understated way. Her meditative and lyrical works have touched many people throughout the years transcending time and all boundaries. Martin passed away in Taos, New Mexico, in 2004, at the age of 92.

Source: Solol Art Museum