Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings

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Brice Marden: The plane image

(American, born 1938)

BRICE MARDEN
: If you imagine a sheet of glass that’s invisible, you put that over the surface of a painting. You reduce it down to nothing and that becomes the plane. The image in a painting is projected from that plane.

For me, the history of modern art is tightening the relationship of the image to the plane. So whereas in Renaissance painting, in a Giotto, this image is sort of way behind the plane. It’s much more spatial. Then, through various degrees of abstraction, it tightens up and tightens up, so the image is right on the plane. That’s what Cézanne does. And then the whole history of 20th-century art seems to be where you work up to the ultimate plane image. You try to keep the plane and the image locked together.