Agnes Martin

150 years have softened the straight lines.

Now that I think of it, the wall is like an Agnes Martin.

Maybe that's why her paintings are so moving.

Simple patterns that go in two ways, ephemeral and eternal.

But the reception began to change slowly.

A two thousand and five drawing center exhibition in New York placed af Klint with Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin.

And by twenty thirteen, the Moderne Museet, the museum that had declined the estate four decades earlier, mounted a show called Hilma af Klint, a pioneer of abstraction.

The exhibition traveled, and for the first time, the result was broadly positive.

like yeah draftman and like well it's like a

because you know mark rothko is a a colorist like the world has never seen like the way that he was able to use paint um And who he inspired is an artist, one of my favorite artists in Agnes Martin, who's been deemed a minimalist, although she considered herself to be an abstract expressionist.

Her work is very much about a personal solitude, a kind of like interior spirituality, meditation, and, you know, she was also dealing with her own schizophrenia, which I think her paintings were kind of possibly therapeutic in that life.

So her stuff and Mark Rothko, and they kind of build off the Hilma of Clint as well.

Yeah.

Agnes Martin, Sam Louise with tuberculosis on his face in bed up in traction and painting on the floor.

Frank Bowling

right now.

Yeah.

So the Ipswich Art Gallery, which is my local art gallery and my favourite, and they do amazing shows there.

And at the moment they have a couple of Agnes Martins and they've got a Mark Rothko painting on loan from the National Gallery.

Now, when I first saw this Rothko painting, I thought, God, that's an ugly painting.

It is.

over the course of your work

it's just super slow yeah It's like, I remember the year when the line started crossing, you know, like it's just, but you know, the thing is, is, is that like, I guess that's really just me, you know, like I like so many different things, but it feels fake to try to just go like, oh, now I'm doing like this thing or that thing, you know? And for me, it's like, you know, it, it, it embodies like Joseph Albers or a color field painting or minimalism or agnes martin or yeah totally you know like um yeah just some of my you know sort of yeah disparate influences but still feels like my own totally

yeah yeah am i would i be right to say that the process is a big part of what you do

Yeah.

uh-huh, uh-huh.

And that hasn't really happened yet.

The last thing we looked at was the Agnes Martin pictures in SFMOMA.

And that was a little...

Mm.

And then my second answer, and I won't forget this, and is my great, great respect and adulation and gratitude to the, the enormously important artist Agnes Martin.

I want to talk about Agnes 'cause I love Agnes so much and, I mean, it seems to me there's this amazing thing that happens, which is you meet her in '63, right? Just at that point when the grid work is really coming into this crescendo, you know.

So can you tell me about meeting... 'Cause, 'cause is it right you sort of just rang her up? You admired her, and so you rang her up and, and then went to meet her and so on.

I'm a writer.

I've written a biography of the painter Agnes Martin and a book called Unspeakable Acts, Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s.

I think the title explains itself.

And I'm currently at work on a book about Louise Bourgeois and her husband, the art historian and African art scholar Robert Goldwater.

There's a wonderful energy and there's this sense of very powerful dispersion, which is channeled in a different way in the painting.

So maybe you want to talk about the relationship between the sculpture that was in the paintings that yeah

well so as you said I started out as a painter and even when I was making sculpture I missed painting and I you know I did probably spend the majority of my time drawing even when I was a sculptor so working two-dimensionally is something that's always been in my practice I think that the subject matter for lack of a better word is has stayed the same and changed so there's still fragments there's still tremendous amount of space and movement there's still kind of spectacular events like you know stars in the skies birds migrating and you know these um weather there's still weather right i feel like there is a new element that wasn't in the sculptures, which is one of the fragments coming together and one of a kind of repair taking place.

So there's a kind of stitching together of these disparate elements.

Will you come and help me?

Pass me a box, then This Agnes Martin catalogue

I gave him that.

[sighs] Oh, he had binoculars

They're not coming yet.

Okay.

So have you fallen out of love with Agnes Martin?

What?