Charles R. Rushton, Agnes Martin, April 6, 1991. Galisteo, NM, 1991.
Our Lady in the Desert
On Agnes Martin: Innocent Love, at Pace Gallery New York through December 20th, 2025.In 1928, Agnes Martin was on track to be an Olympic swimmer, a biographical footnote thatlater, becomes nearly impossible not to harmonize with her approach to painting. In both, she exercised a certain taciturn discipline, an endless patience for repetition, and a severe ruthlessness, always raising the standards of the exacting expectations she set for herself. That she qualified for the Canadian national team just goes to show Martin understood the importance of having a practice long before she ever picked up a brush.
At first glance, the visual profile of much of her work vibrates with the same austerity that would doubtless serve a competitive athlete well. Enamored with the grid, with the logic of linear, geometric patterns, Martin made paintings that could easily be read as a study in control. She destroyed much of her early work, preferring to come into the canon fully formed, a master of her own aesthetic language with few breadcrumbs left behind to illuminate how she had developed it. Her mature palette is famously restrained, her compositions more so.
But there is a deeper truth to her paintings’ minimal profiles. The works are, in fact, less focused on rigidity than on repetition. And specifically, repetition as a form of change. As a method to incrementally alter, to arrive, to make peace. Heavily influenced by the philosophy of Taoism, her muted pastels and strict lines offer visual meditations, an aesthetic asceticism that rightfully distinguishes her from her Minimalist peers. Hers is not merely a formalist enterprise; there is a spiritualism to her work that you will not find in Judd’s objects, however specific.
In fact, in Martin’s painting, the grid appears very much as its opposite. Rather than a container, a system for organization, she deftly uses it to gesture at the unknown; lines transform, illustrating in a poetic, almost ironic kind of way, the futility inherent to the attempt we so often make to hem in an existence, to reach total comprehension, to flirt with surety. Martin is, in essence, painting a kind of release, making work that has much more in common with the sweeping gestures of a Joan Mitchell than the tight theories underlying a Robert Morris. Her work captures emotional reality rather than attempting to represent it, which, one gets the sense, would involve a translation far too indirect for her liking. She is seeking immediacy.
In 1967, Agnes left New York. She did so without fanfare and with barely a word, even to her closest confidants. After a year and a half driving around North America, she settled backin New Mexico and set about constructing a novel existence oriented firmly, and near exclusively, towards her own creative needs and desires. The result was custom cut: a lifepeppered with intense solitude, spent in service of her art making, unencumbered by the distractions of metropolitan life. It’s the kind of story that builds a mythology. Alone in the desert, Martin drew out her grids, arriving at a painted and lived manifesto, one where the ebullience of life is in the wavering line, where repetition is the practice, the perpetual attempt towards an existence that fits and feels right. Look at any number of her paintings today and you’re faced with a clear, coherent argument against the illusion of completion. We live to try and try again, and Martin’s paintings make this plain, visual studies in steady process as the onlymeans towards eventual transformation. x
December 2025
Cover image: Agnes Martin on the roof at Coenties Slip with Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly, 1957. Photographed by Hans Namuth.