Brice Marden

One of the things about art is that it is full of contradictions. The only rule is there are no rules. But everybody works by rules. You set up your own rules.
—Brice Marden

Gagosian is pleased to announce Let the painting make you, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Brice Marden (1938–2023) opening on November 2 at 980 Madison Avenue in New York.

The exhibition features a group of large paintings that Marden made in his studio in Tivoli, New York, in 2023, along with sixteen recent drawings that he made on the Caribbean island of Nevis and in Marrakech, Morocco. The paintings are characterized by weblike linear networks that cover variously colored grounds, and the group has a raw, spontaneous look, showing Marden drawing on intuition honed over a lifetime. These final works convey his idea of letting the paintings “make” us.

Marden was inspired by a broad range of art historical sources and spiritual traditions, and by experience gleaned through extensive travel. Allied with references to the natural world, these resources inspired an open-ended approach to painting through which he transformed earthly material into transcendent compositions of shape, color, and texture.