Spanning the years 1990—2004, the final installment in Dia’s five-part retrospective devoted to Agnes Martin’s oeuvre will include “Innocent Love,” a suite commissioned by Dia in 1999, in addition to other paintings that also explore her long-standing preoccupation with states of innocence, joy, and happiness. Exceptional among these signature works from her final years are the anomalous “black” paintings informed by a more foreboding or disturbing tenor, they recall some of her first ma... Read more
Spanning the years 1990—2004, the final installment in Dia’s five-part retrospective devoted to Agnes Martin’s oeuvre will include “Innocent Love,” a suite commissioned by Dia in 1999, in addition to other paintings that also explore her long-standing preoccupation with states of innocence, joy, and happiness. Exceptional among these signature works from her final years are the anomalous “black” paintings informed by a more foreboding or disturbing tenor, they recall some of her first mature statements of the late 1950s.
Agnes Martin was born in Macklin, a town in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912. She grew up in Vancouver, then moved to Bellingham, Washington, in 1932. Martin gained a bachelor of science degree in 1942 and a master of arts degree in 1952 from Teachers College at Columbia University, while living intermittently in New Mexico. In 1957 she relocated to Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan. She had her first one-person exhibition in 1958 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York. Surveys of her work have been presented at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1973), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1991), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992). From the late sixties until her death on December 16, 2004, Martin lived and worked in rural New Mexico.
