Leroy Lamis, 84, died Thursday, Aug. 19, 2010, in Austin, Texas. Mr. Lamis was a sculptor and long-time professor of art at Indiana State University. His Plexiglas sculptures, known for their geometric elegance, were exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and are in the collections of leading museums and private collectors.

Mr. Lamis was born in Eddyville, Iowa, and moved to Los Angeles during the depression. As a teenager, he worked at MGM studios in Culver City. He attended New Mexico Highlands University and received a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York. He married Esther Sackler in 1954, taught at Cornell College in Iowa, then moved to Terre Haute, Ind., in 1961, where he taught studio art and art history at Indiana State University until his retirement in 1988. In 1970, he was Artist in Residence at Dartmouth College. He was a fixture in the Wabash Valley art community and had exhibits at the Swope Art Museum, Indiana State University, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Lamis journeyed to New York City with his modern cubist sculptures in tow. He found immediate success with art collectors in New York, being invited to join the Contemporaries Gallery. In 1964, his sculptures were featured in the Whitney Museum Annual exhibit, and in 1965, Lamis’ pieces were selected to participate in one of the most important modern art exhibits of the era, The Responsive Eye at The Museum of Modern Art.

From 1965 to 1971 his sculptures were shown and sold by Staempfli Gallery in New York City, where he had three one-man shows. From 1968 to 1969, his one-man show toured throughout the country including exhibits at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville, John Herron Museum, Indianapolis, Des Moines Art Center, La Jolla Museum of Art, and Tacoma Museum of Art. In total, his artworks were featured in over 100 individual and group exhibits around the world.

His works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Collection, Washington, the Albright-Knox Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum, and in the private collections of Seymour Knox, Howard Lipman, SI Newhouse Jr., Roy R. Newberger, Denise Rene, and Robert Sarnoff among other collectors.

(Source: TribStar.com, August 22, 2010)

Julian Dashper in New Caledonia, July 2008

August 7 – September 4, 2010

MINUS SPACE is honored to announce the memorial exhibition Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life. The exhibition marks the one-year anniversary of the New Zealand artist’s death and it will feature a single work by Julian entitled Future Call, as well as written tributes to him by more than 70 artists internationally.

Julian Dashper is one of the most significant reductive artists of his generation. He was one of MINUS SPACE’s earliest international collaborators and supporters, starting around the time of our inception in 2003. Julian has had a core presence in our project ever since. Renowned for his generosity to others, he was highly esteemed both as an artist and individual, and is dearly missed by his family, friends, and the community of artists. As evident in the written tributes to him by artists to be included in the exhibition, Julian’s practice extended well beyond the walls of his studio. He was a “husband, father, friend, partner, collaborator, teacher, mentor, and advocate”. His life and work directly impacted hundreds of artists and others around the globe. His influence and legacy will continue for many years to come.

For Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life, MINUS SPACE will present Julian’s work Future Call consisting of a single telephone installed in the gallery that is periodically called from New Zealand, which is 16 hours ahead of New York City, only to be left ringing and unanswered. Traditionally completed by Julian, Future Call will be performed throughout the exhibition by Julian’s wife, artist Marie Shannon.

In addition, more than 70 artists and other individuals from around the globe contributed texts to the exhibition, including personal notes, memories, anecdotes, criticism, correspondence, poems, and elegies:

Soledad Arias, Marcus Bering, Channa Boon, Ralf Brög, Henry Brown & Millicent Borges Accardi, Mary-Louise Browne, Vicente Butron, Melanie Crader & Mick Johnson, Christoph Dahlhausen, Kasarian Dane, Judy Darragh & Rosanna Albertini, Christopher Dean, Matthew Deleget & Rossana Martinez, Ali Duffey, Daniel Feingold, Linda Francis, Alicia Frankovich, Zipora Fried, Andrea Gaskin, Daniel Göttin & Gerda Maise, Michelle Grabner, Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery, Vaughan Gunson, Jenny Halliday, Lynne Harlow, Miriam Harris, Gilbert Hsiao, William Hsu, Simon Ingram, Kyle Jenkins, Ian Jervis, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, James Juszczyk, Steve Karlik, Mark Kirby, WJM Kok, Keira Kotler, Elodie Lesourd, Stephen Little, Joshua Lux, MariaMaria, Jackie Meier, Moreno Miorelli, Dane Mitchell, Victoria Munro, Geoff Newton, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Salvatore Panatteri, Carrie Patterson, Nathan Pohio, Gwynneth Porter, Mel Prest, Linda Roche, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Erik Saxon, Karen Schifano, Marie Shannon, Sandra Smith, Barbara Strathdee, Clary Stolte, Robert Swain, David Thomas, Mandy Thomsett-Taylor, Tilman, Jan van der Ploeg, Machiel van Soest, Erica van Zon, Jan Maarten Voskuil, Isha Welsh, Marcus Williams, Emi Winter, Rachael Wren, Patricia Zarate, and others.

Fittingly, Julian Dashper was born on February 29, 1960 (leap year day). During his career, he mounted more than 140 solo exhibitions of his work worldwide, including in New Zealand, Australia, Asia, Europe, and the United States. In 2001, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to be an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. A 25-year retrospective of Julian’s work, entitled Midwestern Unlike You and Me, curated by Christopher Cook and David Raskin, traveled the United States during 2005-2006, making stops at the Sioux City Art Center, IA; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, NE; and Ulrich Museum of Art, KS. Julian’s work was included in our comprehensive group exhibition MINUS SPACE at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NYC in 2008-2009. Julian died on July 30, 2009, and is survived by his wife Marie Shannon and their teenage son Leo.

SUPPORT
We would like to thank artists Marie Shannon, Victoria Munro, and Jan van der Ploeg for their tremendous assistance in organizing this exhibition. We would also like to thank all of the artists who contributed heartfelt texts to the show. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

PRESS
Summer Group Shows, by Robert Shuster, Village Voice, August 25, 2010
Julian Dashper: It Is Life at MINUS SPACE, by Tana Mitchell, PROCESS Blog, August 18, 2010
Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life at MINUS SPACE, James Kalm Report, August 8, 2010
A Must-See, Artlog, August 7, 2010
Artlog’s Top Art & Culture Picks, Huffington Post, August 4, 2010
Be Prepared to Go With the Flow, by Adam Gifford, New Zealand Herald, July 31, 2010

MINUS SPACE
98 4th Street, Buzzer #28
Brooklyn, NY 11231
> directions

Rubem Ludolf, Untitled, 2004
Oil on canvas
80 x 100 cm

Considered one of the top names in Brazilian neoconcretism, painter, architect and landscaper Rubem Ludolf died aged 78 on Monday, July 26, in Rio de Janeiro. Victim of an aneurysm in the aorta, the artist was admitted for ten days in the Samaritan Hospital.

Self-taught in the early career in the mid-1950s, Ludolf was a student of Ivan Serpa Free Course in Painting from the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ). Along with Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape and Aluisio Coal, he joined the Grupo Frente, looking for creative freedom and experimentation in different languages of geometry and colors. With the group, attended the 3rd International Biennial of Sao Paulo in 1955, returning to the show in five editions between 1959 and 1973, receiving the Purchase Award in 1967.

Among his most recent exhibitions are individual in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro in 2002, the gallery Berenice Arvan, in Sao Paulo in 2005. In early 2010, the Caixa Cultural do Rio de Janeiro had a retrospective celebrating 60 years of career Ludolf.

On account of death, the exhibition “Dialogues” opened in the presence of the artist on the last day on June 9 Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud (SP), was extended until July 31. (source: UOL)

Doug Ohlson

(from Artnet Magazine, July 1, 2010)

Doug Ohlson, 73, New York painter of sensuous color abstractions, died on June 29 at Bellevue Hospital from injuries suffered from a fall. Born in Cherokee, Iowa, Ohlson served in the Marines before coming to New York in 1961 to pursue a career as an artist. One of the last of a long line of “formalist” painters who sought to give color a pure, non-illusionist pictorial vitality, Ohlson made color “the music of visual art. . . abstract, sensuous and sufficient unto itself,” according to critic E.C. Goossen. His work was included in “The Art of the Real,” the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 1968 survey of Minimalism and Color Field painting, and in 1969 he exhibited a cycle of abstract paintings at Fischbach Gallery on a custom-built rectilinear structure that effectively turned the gallery inside-out. He later exhibited at Susan Caldwell, Andre Zarre and Elaine Baker galleries, and was given survey shows at Bennington College (1982) and Hunter College (2002). He taught at Hunter for many years. A memorial gathering is scheduled for 2-5 pm, July 3, 2010, at Greenwich Village Funeral Home.

Ludwig Wilding, renowned German artist and founder of the Stiftung fur konkrete Kunst und Design in Ingolstadt, Germany, died on January 4, 2010. He was 82 years old. Wilding was one of the most important representatives of European Op Art.

Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images
Click for New York Times obituary

Peter Forakis, Atlanta Gateway, 1967

From The New York Times, December 17, 2009

Peter Forakis, a sculptor who helped found Park Place, a prominent New York artists’ cooperative gallery of the 1960s, died on Nov. 26 in Petaluma, Calif. He was 82 and lived in Petaluma.

His death was announced by the Togonon Gallery in San Francisco, which has represented him since 2007.

Mr. Forakis was one of many young artists in the late ’50s and early ’60s who took up geometry and moved into three-dimensional space as a way to avoid the omnipresence of Abstract Expressionism.

Born in Hanna, Wyoming, to Greek immigrants, he grew up in California, in Oakland and Modesto, and served in the merchant marine from 1949 to 1950 and in the military in Korea from 1951 to 1953. He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1957 and moved to New York in 1958. Over the next few years he went from concentrating on painting to making sculptures, just as geometry was becoming a force in both mediums, but especially in sculpture, Minimalist and not.

In 1963, a group that included Mr. Forakis, Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor and Forrest Myers started exhibiting their work, playing free jazz and discussing the future of public sculpture in a floor at the top of a loft building in Lower Manhattan near Park Place, where several of them lived. The first director was John Gibson, who would later have a gallery of his own.

However geometrically inclined, these artists avoided the simple, stable shapes of Minimalism. Their best-known member, Mr. di Suvero, favored dynamic, open structures of tilted and balanced beams, objects and forms. His Park Place colleagues worked with and against his influence, usually with more streamlined forms or brighter colors.

Often consisting of repeating, flattened volumes tilted on a corner, Mr. Forakis’s work had a mathematical demeanor; sometimes it evoked the black, chunky forms of the Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith.

In 1965 Park Place relocated to 542 West Broadway (now La Guardia Place) and became known for ecumenical invitationals that included artists as varied as Ronald Bladen, Al Held, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Sylvia Stone, Ronnie Landfield, Carl Andre and Joan Jonas. Park Place closed in 1967. A year later its second director, Paula Cooper, opened her own gallery on Prince Street in SoHo, and for a time represented a few Park Place artists.

In addition to Park Place, Mr. Forakis had New York solo shows in the 1960s at the Brata Gallery, the David Anderson Gallery and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In 1966 his work appeared in “Primary Structures,” an important exhibition of geometric sculpture at the Jewish Museum.

Mr. Forakis returned to Northern California in 1979. His last New York show was at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in 1982.

He is represented in several public collections and numerous commissions in Atlanta, Denver, Oakland, Nyack, N.Y., and elsewhere. In 2008 his work was included in “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York” at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin.

Mr. Forakis’s marriage to the artist Phyllis Yampolsky ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter, Christina Forakis of Sacramento, who is the child of an earlier relationship; and by two children from his marriage to Ms. Yampolsky, Gia Forakis of New York City and Jozeph Forakis of Milan.

Click for Manfred Jäger’s web site

Dear friends,

It is with tremendous sadness that we post the passing of our dear friend and collaborator, New Zealand artist Julian Dashper (1960-2009).  Julian was one of the kindest, most generous, and optimistic individuals we’ve ever met.  MINUS SPACE brought him into our lives and we are proud to have had the opportunity to get to know and work with him, ever so briefly.

Julian is survived by his partner Marie and son Leo. We will post additional information as it becomes available.

We invite your reflections on Julian.  Please feel free to share your thoughts with the community by commenting below.

Julian, you will be so dearly missed.  

With affection,
Matthew & Rossana

A recent card from Smack Mellon

Gallery Card as Relic?, by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, June 23, 2009

“Of all the things going the way of the Internet these days, one is the gallery exhibition announcement card. For decades this useful bit of art-world indicator has been an indispensable constant creatively deployed by artists, avidly cherished by the ephemera-obsessed and devotedly archived by museums. But lately the death knell has been sounding, each a linguistic (and attitudinal) variation on the same theme…”

PS – MINUS SPACE has been paperless since 2003.

The Danish artist Ib Geertsen died on Wednesday, June 3, 2009.

Geertsen is survived by his wife Birthe, and their grandson and granddaughter. The funeral will take place on June 12 at Timotheus Kirken, Valby, Copenhagen where there is a stained-glass window designed by Geertsen.

“Ib Geertsen is the grand old man of Danish abstraction, but was little known in the UK until he was championed by London’s Rocket Gallery in a recent group show with other Danes associated with an abstract movement known as Konkrete. This was followed by Geertsen’s first London solo show at Rocket Gallery in 2009, at the age of 90.

He trained as a gardner rather than an artist, but came to prominence as a painter in the 1950s with other Konkrete artists, and pursued with them a distinctive hard-edged, geometric abstract language which arguably pre-dated comparable developments in America. Geertsen has pursued that approach consistently for 50 years and has also expanded into furniture, mobile sculptures and public design.” — Paul Carey-Kent, from an interview with Ib Geertsen published in Art World, June/July 2009, which includes a feature on the Danish art world.

An exhibition of Ib Geertsen’s mobiles opened on the day of his death at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Jutland, Denmark, curated by the Director Jens Erik Sørensen. The exhibition continues until September 27, 2009.

Ib Geertsen’s work was also included in Michelle Grabner’s recent viewlist project for MINUS SPACE: There are many things in the air and all of them are for free.

Frederick Hammersley, abstract painter, born in 1919, died peacefully  on Sunday, May 31, 2009 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of 90.   Hammersley is known as one of the Los Angeles-based “Abstract  Classicists” whose work gained international attention through the  exhibition Four Abstract Classicists at the Los Angeles County Museum  in 1959.  The term “hard edge” was coined at the time to describe the  geometric, abstract paintings by Hammersley, Karl Benjamin, Lorser  Feitelson and John McLaughlin.
 
Hammersley attended Chouinard Art School from 1940-42 and 1946-47,  served in the Army from 1942-46, studied at the Ēcole des Beaux Arts in  1946, and attended Jepson Art School from 1947-50.  He taught at  Jepson, Pomona College, Chouinard, and the University of New Mexico  until the early 1970s when he began painting full time.  His mature  works are comprised of the “hunch” paintings (1953-59), the “geometrics” (1959-64 and 1965-the mid-1990s), and the “organics (1964,  and 1982-2009).  They are included in the collections of  Albright Knox  Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, High Museum of Art, La Jolla Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Pomona College Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico Museum of  Art, Roswell Museum, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, among others.
 
A consummate draftsman, Hammersley formed the edges of the shapes in  his paintings with a palette knife, never using tape or a mechanical  device to form a straight edge. The unique frames he made for his small  organic abstractions added an almost folk-art quality to his otherwise  strictly modernist paintings.  His titles, which he also considered part of his works, often presented intended double meanings or  reflected the actions of the forms within the composition.  
 
Frederick Hammersley moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1968 to  assume the position of Assistant Professor of Art at the University of  New Mexico and remained in Albuquerque until his passing.  Hammersley  is survived by his sister Susie H. Stone, of Santa Fe.  There will be a  memorial service on June 20 at 1 p.m. at the University of New Mexico Alumni Chapel.

MINUS SPACE welcomes your comments on the life and legacy of Frederick Hammersley.  Please comment on this post below.

Listeners at Max Neuhaus’ Water Whistle III
St. Paul YMCA, 1972
Sponsor: Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis

“Max Neuhaus, a percussionist known for creating site-specific works of “sound sculpture,” allowing unsuspecting passers-by to come upon musical sounds in unlikely places, died Tuesday in Maratea, a coastal town in southern Italy, where he lived. He was 69…”

Max Neuhaus’ web site

Born in Los Angeles in 1932, New Yorker art dealer John Weber had a prominent role in the contemporary art world and was one of the first dealers in Soho in the 70s, leaving his mark on New York’s art scene of that period. Owner of the popular John Weber Gallery, which opened in West Broadway in Soho in 1971, he then moved to Chelsea in the ’90s where he began his rise in the art world. After leaving the Navy, Weber accepted a job at the Dayton Art Institute as member of the curatorial staff. Later he attended the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and worked for the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. He then made the successful move to the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles, where he was involved in many outstanding shows and worked with artists like Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Arman, Yves Klein, Franz Kline, Sol LeWitt, Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Jeff Koons, Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke and many more, collaborating as well with the Fluxus Group and the Arte Povera movement. (courtesy: Flash Art Magazine)

Elizabeth Murray, Flamingo, 1974

Jeremy Blake, Station to Station: Carbon Sink Park, 2001
Still from DVD with sound for projection or plasma screen
16 minute continuous loop

Jeremy Blake, an up-and-coming artist who sought to bridge the worlds of painting and film in lush, color-saturated, hallucinatory digital video works, has died.

Click image for New York Times obituary 

Bernd Becher, 75, influential Minimalist photographer who with his wife, Hilla Becher, was celebrated for black-and-white photographs of industrial structures, died on June 22 in Rostock, Germany, following heart surgery. Bernd and Hilla Becher met while studying at Dusseldorf Academy and were married in 1961. They had their first gallery exhibition in 1963; retrospectives of their work were held at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (1981), Dia in New York (1989-91) and the Kunstverein Cologne (1991). Both were influential teachers at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. (credit: ArtNet Magazine).

Critic Jerry Saltz remembers artist Sol Lewitt.  ”He was an artistic giant whose contributions were so far-reaching that he straddled the categories of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Postminimalism. In the late 1960s, LeWitt created an enormous opening for other artists...”

Sol LeWitt, Cubic-Modular Wall Structure, Black, 1966
Painted wood, 43 1/2 x 43 1/2 x 9 3/8 inches
Collection of Museum of Modern Art, NY

Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art  (1967)

“I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art.  In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.  (In other forms of art, the concept may be changed in the process of execution.)  When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.  The idea becomes a machine that makes the art…

Conceptual art is not necessarily logical.  The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times only to be ruined…  The ideas need not be complex.  Most ideas that are successful are ludicriously simple…  Ideas are discovered by intuition.

What the work of art looks like isn’t too important.  It has to look like something if it has physicaly form.  No matter what form it may finally have, it must begin with an idea.  It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned…

Conceptual art doesn’t really have much to do with mathematics, philosophy, or any other mental discipline.  The mathematics used by most artists is simple arithmetic or simple number systems.  The philosophy of the work is implicit in the work and is not an illustration of any system of philisophy…  

Conceptual art is only good when the idea is good.”

(photo credit: Barbara Parmet)

Carol Becker remembers maverick curator Marcia Tucker, former Whitney Museum curator (1969-1977) and founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art (1977-1999) in New York.

(photo credit: Michael Paoletta)

Artist John Zinsser recalls his long-term friendship with artist Rudolf De Crignis.

Hans Wegner was one of the most innovative and prolific of all Danish furniture designers. His work is representative of the excellent craftsmanship and commitment to modern living that made mid-century Danish design internationally popular. His work belongs to the minimalist school, but preserves function. He is perhaps best known for his many beautifully and cleverly designed chairs using the finest of craftmanship.

Dan Christensen, Pavo, 1968, acrylic on canvas

New York painter Dan Christensen died at his home in Easthampton on January 20. Christensen moved to New York in 1965 and became a member of the group of post-Minimalist artists associated with Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field painting. Christensen had over 60 solo exhibitions, beginning in the ‘60s and ‘70s at Andre Emmerich in New York, Nicholas Wilder in Los Angeles, and Rolf Ricke in Cologne.

Larry Zox, Green Diamond Drill: Keokuk, 1968
Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 64 inches

(photo credit: Rudolf de Crignis Estate & Peter Blum Gallery, New York)

Agnes Martin, by Steve Karlik

I went for a walk yesterday; a thin veil of snow cloaked the sidewalk. 

At once, grids became apparent. 

The accumulation of packed snow in the concrete’s seams made opaque grids, grids that were again defined by planes of less dense, more transparent layers of snow that covered the higher surfaces. 

The combination of these lines and planes brought me back to painting and why painting has significance for me. 

Reason, logic, the man made: the systems and structures within which we navigate that need to be expressed because we navigate them. 

I saw what I needed to think about. 

Where the snow began to melt the planes fell away and the grids softened, I was reminded, as I am with Agnes Martin’s work, that with structure there is always the poetic that defines it.

Agnes Martin, by Kevin Finklea

“I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect — completely removed in fact — even as we ourselves are.”

This is the opening of the Notes section of Agnes Martin’s Writings/Schriften (1991, Hatze Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany). 

I found myself opening this book for the first time in many years. This book essentially replaced the scattered notes, xeroxes and catalog quotations I had gathered over the years from Agnes Martin. I held on to this and Profile: Agnes Martin (vol. 1, no. 2, March 1981, Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, Illinois). While there is much that I can say about her work that was and remains important to me; it was her writing and interviews that were of the greatest use to me as a young artist. Her ruminations on investigation, truth and perfection are absolutely peerless.

My recent interview with MINUS SPACE suddenly sprang to mind. I recalled saying that nothing I paint is perfect. I then used the word approximation to further describe my work’s perceived perfectness. I have to admit a wave of embarassment came over me. While I felt momentarily like a plagerist, I soon realized that I had actually internalized and put into practice much of what Martin had to say about painting. It is employing this sense of self-analysis and reflection that was Martin’s greatest contribution to non-objective painters. I can not encourage young non-objective painters enough to read what she had to say. I offer the following from Profile: Agnes Martin:

“The work of artists is an investigation into truth, and you’re going to see it in your mind, you own mind.”

Thoughts on Agnes, by Douglas Witmer

There was record flooding in south central Pennsylvania, where I grew up, in the aftermath of Hurricane Agnes in 1972. I was too young to remember the event, but the phrase “flood of Agnes” was often spoken in my childhood. I didn’t know Agnes was a woman’s name. The sound of it definitely left an impression. This is an aside, though…

I long fancied making a visit to Taos to visit Agnes Martin. I read she took visitors. I never knew what I would ask or say, though. Words tend to drop away for me when it comes to her work.

I believe I did not actually “see” the first Agnes Martin painting I was exposed to. It was likely “The Rose,” which sometimes hangs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the time was probably in the late 1980s. It took interacting with the work of my mentor Warren Rohrer, who shared affinities with Agnes, for my consciousness to be opened.

I’ve begun to think that’s how some work is — invisible until its viewer is ready to see.

In my upbringing I was encouraged to “be in the world but not of the world” and this is definitely a feeling I got from Agnes’ work. The feeling was bolstered as I learned more about her life and writing.

The story of her move to the desert, building a house by hand (one account made it sound like she began by putting adobe around her camper and worked outward from there) and of her “quitting” painting for the better part of a decade: I find all of that an inspiring example of taking an alternative path. I wrestle personally, though, with the viability of that kind of asceticism for an artist of my generation.

Seeing her early work at Dia:Beacon this past fall was a true highlight. Whereas her gridded paintings could at times seem a closed system, cutting themselves off from the world, the early works were incredibly open, humble, innocent, and vulnerable. I could see they came from a special time and place. I am very curious about her decision to revisit some of those images in what was her last exhibition at Pace Wildenstein.

I made a special trip to see those paintings in real life. I’m glad I did, but they made me sad because in them I felt like I could see that Agnes no longer possessed the physical mechanics. The paint quality didn’t carry the images like it had before.

Her paintings, like all reductive or distilled work, have such possibility for total failure. In this (our) kind of work, it’s a real accomplishment when feel you have made a success. Agnes’ work for so long had all the parts in play so beautifully and I am thankful to be able to experience that.

Meeting Agnes Martin, by Sharon Brant

In 1973 Agnes Martin was in New York City. I think she was here in preparation for a retrospective of her work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This may have been the first retrospective for her, because she was not famous in a widespread way as she is now. Mostly, painters knew and loved her work.

Somehow I heard, maybe through the art world grapevine, she was going to give a talk at Cooper Union. I was excited and could not believe my good fortune. She was a painter I admired very much and I was going to be in her presence. This was an unusual event because she had left NYC a long time ago and was living in New Mexico in a reclusive way.

The group that had gathered was not huge. It wasn’t held in Cooper Union’s big auditorium. It was in a classroom. She spoke slowly and carefully, as if she had prepared succinctly the entire talk. At one point she was silent for a really long time, as if she was trying to remember what she wanted to say next. Now, regardless of its reason, the combination of this silence and succinctness is so appropriate, because it’s what we experience in her paintings. I don’t remember the specifics of her talk, but I remember the stance about painting she embodied as she stood before us. The way I would put it is that she made paying attention to her thoughts and attitudes the main purpose of her life and that painting then developed out of that awareness. Yes, the painting comes out of how we live our lives.

Agnes Martin, by Chris Ashley

I learned about Agnes Martin as an undergrad in the San Francisco Bay Area, around 1976. I had an early, natural attraction to abstract art, even as young as 11 or 12; on a trip to the Oakland Museum with my grandmother around 1968 I was as interested in Bierstadt [1], as, say, Hassel Smith [2]. I thought that a painting is a painting: they all deserve to be looked at, and that they weren’t that easy to make. Adults said that a child could make that, but I didn’t agree; I couldn’t make one, and I thought there was something going on there besides the skilled (or unskilled) representation of a person, tree, cow, or table top. I don’t know why I knew that so young.

At age 18 or 19 I suddenly had access to a college library with freely available back issues of art magazines, which I studied pretty closely in the stacks. I particularly liked Art International and Artforum. This, combined with access to SFMOMA, the de Young and Legion of Honor, the Oakland Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum, were the real foundation of my education, rather than the studio classes I took, where I pretty much ended up doing whatever I wanted to do anyway.

I became really intrigued by what was usually called minimalist painting: Ryman, Marden, Novros, Berthot, Humphrey, etc., in NY; Charlton, Greene in the UK; the Swiss — Lohse, Bill; BMPT in France: Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni; as well as lots of others. I was really interested in a number of question: what is a painting; how could so little could provoke so much looking; what is the basis for the artist of this kind of work; is this a reduction or expansion of painting, i.e., is minimalist painting additive (starting from zero) or subtractive (a removing from painting of other subjects, techniques, concerns); how are decisions made by the artist; what are the differences between similar kinds of work, and how does an individual resist the urge to fix things up, design, and decorate.

The problem was that in the SF Bay Area I found little exposure to this work (that would change around 1979-80 when two SF galleries — Modernism and Shirley Cerf — were actively showing Saxon, Hayward, Tchakalian, Marioni, Hafif, Gimblett, Sims, Lawson, to name a few). I was trying to figure it out through reproductions, all the while still looking closely at Bay Area figurative artists like Diebenkorn, Park, Bischoff, Brown, and Neri.

I recall on a late afternoon in 1976 buying a copy of Art News (vol. 75, no. 7, September 1976) [3] at the Oakland Museum. A Rembrandt self portrait is on the cover, and inside is a multi-page article about Agnes Martin. I remember that I bought the magazine because of this article; I had seen her name before. I remember walking down the street carrying the magzine, eager to read it later. I clearly recall that the sun was out, light was bouncing off the sidewalk, and it was warm and a little windy. I still have this issue.

The article covered Martin’s history, talked about her leaving New York, the film she made called “Gabriel,” and discussed her new work. I believe the occasion of the article had to do with her first show of new work since she began painting again in 1974. What made an impression on me was the way she wrote and spoke. I had just read Alan Watts’ “The Book,” and I think I’d also begun Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.” Martin’s thoughts and ideas were in this realm, but she spoke as a painter. I was immediately struck by her statement, “Anyone can look at a waterfall all day.” Having read that, I had just then learned a new way to approach a painting and to understand and talk about looking.

I first saw an actual painting by Agnes Martin in 1977; I vividly remember the moment. I walked into a gallery at SFMOMA, at the old building in the Veteran’s War Memorial Building near the City Hall; it was one of the inner galleries just around the corner from the elevators. There it hung, and I instantly knew who the artist was. I felt happy, as if I’d discovered something.

“Falling Blue,” 1963 [4], is six feet square, oil and pencil on canvas which actually looks like coarse, dark linen. Horizontal pencil lines perhaps half an inch apart are ruled to the edges of a framing border of bare canvas two inches or so on all four sides. In between the penciled horizontal lines dark violet-blue is painted in repeated strokes with a small brush from one side to the other; the blue line is brushed horizontally as far as the paint the brush can carry lasts, and then the brush is loaded with more paint to continue the line across. Each horizontal band of blue paint spanning the painting, then, isn’t completely continuous: you can see places in each band where the stroke starts, stops, and continues. Up close you can see the movement, the labor, the patience in these repeated thin stripes. But I didn’t see the details at first. I remember stopping at least ten feet away and seeing the whole painting. The thin stripes of paint turning thick and thin with starts and stops looked something like thin, soft, slowly undulating corduroy, and the painting shimmered. It both gave off and took in light.

Multiple kinds of space could be seen: there was a deep space, difficult to pin down, fuzzy, wavy and distant; there was an intimate space, enveloping and up close, and the painting felt in its material like a real thing, handmade in small amounts like weaving; and there was the formal space of the boundaries between the painting and the wall, and in the border that separated the edge of the canvas and the inner painted area, slices of architectural space against painted space.

The dark brown canvas and the dark blue paint were basically the two colors in the painting, but they simultaneously projected a brillaint image and also collapsed into a kind of mud that couldn’t be captured and separated by the eye. The painting wavered in and out of sight, not always easy to see, but the process of looking at it was an experience that was constant and steady. Finally, I began to see how so little could do and mean so much. I learned a lot from Falling Blue, and I looked at it at every opportunity. I learned how to look at a painting as a critical observer, and as one who experiences the painting emotionally and intellectually.

It’s much harder to say, however, what I learned about making a painting, because the entire painting is there before me — canvas, pencil lines, strokes of blue paint — and the entire act of its making can apparently be deciphered. Why can’t this be easily repeated? I can look at he painting almost as a recipe, but I can’t make it. I learned something to do with intention (having an idea, following through on it, and staring down the results to decide whether or not to keep it) and contrivance (having a bad idea, illustrating an idea, losing sight of or failing to follow the idea, or just plain bad editing of work). “Falling Blue,” and successive paintings by Agnes Martin I’ve seen, taught me about using materials directly, finding and committing to a vision and voice, avoiding illustration, and the power of distillation. I think these are some of the strengths of her work. Happily, she was able to work for a long time, and I believe her example and body of work is very important to any kind of artist.

[1] http://www.museumca.org/images/1151.jpg
[2] http://www.transit-lounge.com/hassel_smith
[3] See Notes, 13: http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs_b/martin-going/essay.html
[4] http://collections.sfmoma.org/Obj207$6082

MARTIN, Agnes
(22 March 1912)

Born in Saskatchewan, she emigrated to the United States in 1932 to attend college in Washington State and New York. In the early 1960s, a few years after relocating from New York to New Mexico, Martin began producing paintings of grids composed of horizontal bricks, so to speak, that run from edge to edge, both vertically and horizontally. Perhaps sensing that she had reached an ultimate image, much as her near-contemporary Ad Rheinhardt had, she stopped painting for several years before returning to grids that were even more subtle in making thin, straight parallel lines that shimmer, and thus evoke a spiritual experience outside of themselves. Not unlike Reinhardt again, Martin is also an assertive writer: “Art work is a representation of our devotion to life. Everyone is devoted to life with an intensity far beyond our comprehension. The slightest hint of devotion to life in art work is received by all with gratitude.” Especially in group exhibitions, in my experience, her work shines through the strength of subtlety.

— Richard Kostelanetz, excerpted with permission from his book A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, New York: Schirmer Books, second edition, 2000