“I paint because I believe it’s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being,” Brice Marden reflected in 1976. He died in August 2023 after an extraordinary six-decade-long career. Throughout, he maintained a commitment to process and doubt over certainty and finish, and strove to synthesize image and plane. His subtle palette suggests a sensitivity to place that—in its translation of lived experience—transcends abstraction. His drawings and paintings are colored by, for example, the light of downtown Manhattan or the shadows of olive trees on the Greek island of Hydra. And his compositions, which range from rectilinear grids to looping networks of calligraphic lines, trace tempos alternately immediate and eternal.
Marden hoped that viewers of his works might be as receptive in meeting them as he was while making them, believing that “the more responsive, the more open, the more imaginative you are when you deal with something, the much better the experience it will be.”
Organized by Samantha Friedman, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, with Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints and Curatorial Affairs.
