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.
