I Am Plane Image — Brice Marden

Gagosian is pleased to announce I Am Plane Image, a comprehensive survey of paintings by Brice Marden at the West 21st Street gallery in New York. Presented in collaboration with the Estate of Brice Marden, this is the first such exhibition of the artist’s work in the city in twenty years. Spanning six decades, the presentation includes major institutional loans from the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, and others, as well as significant works from the Estate and notable private collections. It offers a historic opportunity to view works that have rarely, if ever, been exhibited before. In tandem, Gagosian, again in collaboration with the Estate, will publish Brice Marden: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 1961–2023, edited by scholar Tiffany Bell. Documenting nearly five hundred works, the book represents the most comprehensive study of his paintings to date.

The exhibition emphasizes Marden’s lifelong exploration of the plane and the material presence of his work. “For me,” he stated, “the history of modern art is tightening the relationship of the image to the plane. . . . The whole history of twentieth-century art seems to be where you work up to the ultimate plane image. You try to keep the plane and the image locked together.” Marden’s distinct contribution to painting lies in his synthesis of a broad range of art historical influences, which anchor paintings that address the natural world. He traveled extensively, living in multiple locations and working predominantly with natural light.

From the mid-1960s, Marden immersed himself in the cultural scene of New York, congregating at Max’s Kansas City with the era’s pioneering artists, writers, and musicians. Nebraska (1966)—the earliest painting in the exhibition—was inspired by the “surprising” landscape of the midwest United States after a cross-country road trip. Marden retained the painting and displayed it in his home throughout his life. From this time onward, while often spending time on the Greek island of Hydra, he began to employ the brighter palette seen in Summer Table (1972–73). He also introduced a technique that would become a trademark—heightening the effect of each tint, plane, and brushstroke by adding beeswax and turpentine to oil paint and applying it in multiple layers.

Calligraphy was often a focus of Marden’s practice; in the early 1980s, he realized it at scale in his first calligraphic paintings, which include Study for the Muses (Eagles Mere Version) (1991–94/1997–99). Conceived in his studio in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, which he characterized as his most “Zen-like” workspace, this painting’s color echoes the surrounding woodland. The six panels of The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second Version (2000–06) follow a chromatic progression that also meditates on landscape, here in the tradition of the Chinese garden.

The exhibition concludes with The Dance (2022–23) and Lingerie (2022–23), two large canvases that Marden produced in his studio in Tivoli, New York. Among the last works he completed, both were included in the artist’s final Gagosian exhibition in 2023. Throughout his career, Marden was continually working through a set of ideas about activating the surface of the painting. This was evident as early as his Yale MFA thesis, in which he stated: “I have had to concentrate on the rectangle problems. I have been obsessed with the idea and have become fanatical about it.” I Am Plane Image encapsulates this profound engagement with his concept of the plane.

I Am Plane Image coincides with Gagosian’s publication of Brice Marden: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 1961–2023, edited by Tiffany Bell and distributed by Yale University Press. Bell commenced the project in 2019 with the full support of Marden and his studio, and continued it in collaboration with the Estate of Brice Marden. The book features an introduction by Larry Gagosian, an essay by Bell, and an illustrated chronology by Bell and Anna Gray, as well as two texts by the artist. It documents nearly five hundred paintings made between 1961 and 2023 including almost ninety previously unpublished works and more than seventy that have never been exhibited. The explanatory notes that accompany the artwork entries consist primarily of quotations from Marden himself.

About the artist

A master of color, gesture, and touch, Brice Marden (1938–2023) continuously refined and extended the traditions of lyrical abstraction. Experimenting with self-imposed rules, limits, and processes, and drawing inspiration from his extensive travels, Marden progressed from the shimmering monochromes of his earlier career to the intuitive calligraphic gestures of his later work.

Born in Bronxville, New York, Marden received an MFA from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, where his teachers included the painters Alex Katz and Jon Schueler. After graduation he worked as a guard at the Jewish Museum in New York. There, during a 1964 Jasper Johns retrospective, Marden studied Johns’s early works extensively and considered them in relation to the Baroque masters he has long admired, such as Francisco de Zurbarán, Francisco Goya, and Diego Velázquez. Marden’s paintings from the 1960s include subtle, shimmering monochromes in gray tones, sometimes assembled into multipanel works, in a manner similar to the black paintings and White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, who hired Marden as a studio assistant in 1966.

A trip to Greece in the early 1970s led Marden to create the Hydra paintings (1972), which capture the turquoise hues of the Mediterranean, and Thira (1979–80), a painting composed of eighteen interconnected panels inspired by the shadows and geometry of ancient temples. To heighten the effect of each color, plane, and brushstroke, Marden developed the unique process of adding beeswax and turpentine to oil paint and applying the mixture in many thin layers. Marden employed this technique for the Grove Group paintings (1972–76)—exhibited at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery in New York in 1991, along with related works—and the Red Yellow Blue paintings (1973–74)—four permutations of the primary trio—which were united for the first time since their making at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, in 2013.

In the 1980s Marden began to incorporate organic, intersecting lines, creating rhythmic patterns over fields of color. Exploring these winding lines, he experimented with blank space, erasure, and references to the natural world. He sought to create a mystical experience through the creation of elusive abstract spaces. As his many themes and techniques have overlapped, Marden brought them together in cohesive, often multipart works, which he has described as his “summation paintings.” Among them is The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third Version (2000–06), held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he had his first comprehensive retrospective in 2006.

In his later years Marden continued his exploration of the qualities of monochrome. This engagement with muted colors informed his calligraphic drawings and works on canvas, such as the Nevis Stele paintings (2007–15), inspired by Chinese stone carvings from the late eighth century. In 2017 he turned his gaze to the expansive possibilities of terre verte (green earth), an iron silicate clay pigment, which he first used in the Grove Group. These paintings incorporate many different brands of terre verte, each a variation on the indefinable hue. Marden thinned his slow-drying paint and applied it gradually to the canvas in many successive layers, leaving a visible residue of the painting process at the lower edge of each canvas.