About
Painting is still a question of color and matter coming together and how pigment has to behave in a certain way.
—Brice Marden
Gagosian is pleased to present new paintings and drawings by Brice Marden.
These works continue Marden’s Letter series, in which networks of calligraphic lines and strokes weave through fields of color and tone. Marden begins these paintings by filling the canvas with script-like glyphs, working in columns from top to bottom, right to left. He then links these initial markings through a network of lines, creating webs and threads across the surface of the canvas. As he paints in layers, Marden scrapes away at excess paint on the surface of the canvas, diffusing his lines and allowing a complex play of color, weight, and distance to develop in the pictorial space as he works the canvas deeper into abstraction.
Six paintings, each measuring six feet tall by ten feet wide, were made in Tivoli—the location of Marden’s upstate New York home and studio—where the seasonal changes of the surrounding Northeastern landscape and light frequently influence his use of color. Marden’s body of work has had ties to calligraphic, script-like markings throughout his career, notably in the late 1980s with his Cold Mountain Studies. More recently, the Letter paintings were initially inspired by a poem by Huang Tingjian, a Chinese calligrapher, painter, and poet of the Song dynasty. In these new works, however, Marden experiments with whites, greens, oranges, and vibrant yellows—shades that have until now rarely occurred in his palette. In each of these large-scale paintings, Marden leaves a panel of blank color on either side of the canvas, guiding the viewer’s eye to the interlocking lines at its square center.
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Brice Marden
Larry Gagosian celebrates the unmatched life and legacy of Brice Marden.
The Generative Surface
Eileen Costello explores the oft-overlooked importance of paper choice to the mediums of drawing and printmaking, from the Renaissance through the present day.
Book Corner
Private Pages Made Public
Megan N. Liberty explores artists’ engagement with notebooks and diaries, thinking through the various meanings that arise when these private ledgers become public.
The River Café Cookbook
London’s River Café, a culinary mecca perched on a bend in the River Thames, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2018. To celebrate this milestone and the publication of her cookbook River Café London, cofounder Ruth Rogers sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the famed restaurant’s allure.
Intimate Grandeur: Glenstone Museum
Paul Goldberger tracks the evolution of Mitchell and Emily Rales’s Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Set amid 230 acres of pristine landscape and housing a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art, this graceful complex of pavilions, designed by architects Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened to the public in the fall of 2018.
Brice Marden: Four Quartets
Four paintings by Brice Marden have been incorporated into a new dance commission based on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, with choreography by Pam Tanowitz, and music by Kaija Saariaho. The performance will premiere on July 6, 2018 at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard as part of the SummerScape Festival. Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director for theater and dance, spoke with Marden about the canvases that form the set design.
News
Book Fair
Taipei Art Book Fair 2020
November 13–15, 2020
Huashan 1914 Creative Park, Taipei
taipeiartbookfair.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in the Taipei Art Book Fair 2020 as a guest of Taipei Dangdai. Taipei Dangdai has invited its 2020 exhibitors to each showcase three new publications in its booth. Gagosian will present Georg Baselitz: Years Later, which documents a recent exhibition of new works by the artist at Gagosian, Hong Kong; an exhibition catalogue on Brice Marden’s latest paintings and works on paper, which continue the Letter series he initiated in 2006; and Mary Weatherford: I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By, which documents the artist’s 2018 exhibition at Gagosian, New York, featuring large paintings onto which neon light tubes are attached. To attend the fair, purchase tickets at taipeiartbookfair.com.
Georg Baselitz: Years later (New York: Gagosian, 2020)
Online Reading
Brice Marden
It reminds me of something, and I don’t know what it is.
Brice Marden: It reminds me of something, and I don’t know what it is. is available for online reading from June 15 through July 14 as part of the From the Library series. Published on the occasion of the 2019 exhibition at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, the catalogue features full-color reproductions of Marden’s latest body of paintings and works on paper, which continues the Letter series he initiated in 2006. The book includes a new essay by John Elderfield, in which the curator and art historian discusses the new works in the context of modernist painting and of Marden’s oeuvre, and investigates the allusions the works seem to make.
Brice Marden: It reminds me of something, and I don’t know what it is. (New York: Gagosian, 2020)