Brice Marden
Larry Gagosian celebrates the unmatched life and legacy of Brice Marden.
My work has always been involved with nature, no matter how abstract. Sometimes it’s more formal and less directly related to the real world. But there’s always been some sort of engagement with nature.
—Brice Marden
Gagosian is pleased to present Marbles and Drawings, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Brice Marden. This will be Marden’s first solo exhibition in Greece in four decades and it will inaugurate the new location of the Athens gallery, an elegant stand-alone building in the center of the city.
In 1981, while summering on the island of Hydra, Marden began painting on small fragments of marble from local quarries. These compositions marked a transitional moment in his career. Continuing his long-standing engagement with classical Greek themes—exemplified by earlier monumental oil-and-beeswax paintings such as Thira (1979–80), which feature rich tones and columnar blocks inspired by ancient temples—the marble imparts Marden’s elemental motifs and geometric shapes with a certain luminosity.
Since that time, Marden has continued to make marble paintings, describing his strategy as “taking an accident and turning it into a form.” He partially tints the stone ground with thin, translucent layers of oil paint, producing serenely colored rectangles alongside bars of black and gray. These compositions work in harmony with each stone’s inherent texture and veining pattern; some even preserve traces of ruled graphite markers.
Larry Gagosian celebrates the unmatched life and legacy of Brice Marden.
Eileen Costello explores the oft-overlooked importance of paper choice to the mediums of drawing and printmaking, from the Renaissance through the present day.
Megan N. Liberty explores artists’ engagement with notebooks and diaries, thinking through the various meanings that arise when these private ledgers become public.
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.
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.
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.
In honor of Robert Pincus-Witten, we share an essay he wrote in 1991 on Brice Marden’s Grove Group.
At the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Brice Marden sat down with fellow painter Gary Hume and the Royal Academy’s artistic director, Tim Marlow, to discuss his newest body of work.
With preparations underway for a London exhibition, we visit the artist’s studio.