Canadian-born Agnes Martin made this work soon after moving to New York, where she kept a studio on Coenties Slip, a street in Lower Manhattan where other artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Robert Indiana, also lived and worked. This setting, so close to the East River that she “could see the expressions on the faces of the sailors,” is invoked in the pale blue-gray palette and the chalky, almost watery paint of the abstract geometric composition of Harbor Number 1. Soon after this work was made, Martin would develop her signature style—grids hand-drawn in pencil on large square canvases—which would remain her primary compositional approach for the rest of her career.
Studio Visit: Selected Gifts from Agnes Gund, 2018
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Agnes Martin
American, born Canada. 1912–2004 54 works onlineBorn on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, Canada, Agnes Martin immigrated to the United States in 1932 in the hopes of becoming a teacher.
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Coenties Slip
For a brief period in the 1950s and ’60s, an out-of-the-way street at the southeastern edge of Manhattan hosted a community of artists whose work there would change art history.
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