You have to bring your whole mind to bear on painting; to carry on, to go forward. Painting is not making paintings; it is a development of awareness. And with this awareness, your work changes, but very slowly.

Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings draws primarily from Dia’s extensive collection of Martin’s canvases to focus on the breadth of the artist’s output during the 1950s and ’60s, complemented by important works from the latter decades of her practice, as well as significant loans.

Charting Martin’s transition from quasi-organic abstraction to the graphite grid, this selection illuminates how she developed her approach to creating highly considered, delicately balanced compositions, which progressed slowly and iteratively over time. Key examples of her use of the grid—a distinctly reduced compositional device, rigorously yet meditatively articulated with hand-drawn lines—demonstrate how Martin expanded and refined her Minimal vocabulary over the course of the 1960s. A series of works created post-1974, following a painting hiatus of several years, encompass the range of compositions and palettes she adopted in that period, from horizontal bands and luminous acrylic washes to the return of geometric forms and her final “black” canvases. Martin’s evolution over the course of five decades articulates her refusal of painting as a product-driven practice but as a way of existing in the world.

Returning her work to Dia Beacon’s galleries for the first time in nearly a decade, this exhibition offers a renewed opportunity to view Martin’s singular contributions to Minimalism in the context of her conceptually like-minded peers.

Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings is curated by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, with Emily Markert, curatorial associate.