Brice Marden

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2010

This work is in very good condition overall. The sheet is hinged on the reverse to the backing board. The edges are slightly deckled and there is some very minor hairline craquelure in the top right quadrant of the sheet. There is a soft undulation to the sheet, inherent to the artist's working method. Framed under Plexiglas.
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In Stele Drawing 9 (2007-2008), Brice Marden exhibits a freedom of sinuous line and organic form that benefits from the rhythmic inspiration of Asian calligraphy, but goes beyond those columnar figurations and tautly braided compositions to achieve a newly triumphant sense of clarity and forcefulness. The present work is striking in its complexity. Though it reads simply black and white from a distance, up close, subtle green, blue and grey hues emerge. Marden works the surface of the sheet, layering thin skeins of entwined lines over each other to form a complex web. From his Stele series, this elegant little drawing draws a parallel with its title, stele, a stone slab, its form and presence evoking a cryptic ancient tablet.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Marden indulged in the possibilities of linear abstraction, reveling in gestural compositions and forms that overlap in locked embrace. As he progressed through the decade of the 1990s, Marden’s color schemes varied from vivid and florid to soft and atmospheric, and his line flattened and broadened as it wended its way across his surfaces. As the rounded spaces within Marden’s web of interlocking lines enlarged, references to sculptural and volumetric characteristics can be discerned and curator Charles Wylie has noted a suggestion of the rounded proportions of the diminutive Venus of Willendorf, one of the oldest known carved representations of the human figure. (Exh. Cat., Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art,Brice Marden, Work of the 1990s: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, 1999, p. 35) By the time he produced the Stele series, Marden’s forms had a new measured pace and the circuitous linear networks abandoned the braided and intertwined compositions of the early 1990s, and instead retained Marden’s intersecting linear construct, overlaying one another in an undeviated hierarchy of line.

An exquisite interplay of simplicity and complexity, clarity and mystery, Stele Drawing 9 embodies Marden’s deep affinity for drawing as the wellspring of creative endeavor.  Jackson Pollock is often cited as an inspiration for Marden’s all-over compositions, both in his monochromatic panel paintings and in his linear abstract drawings, and Pollock’s famous melding of “drawing into painting” is clearly relevant to Marden’s paintings and drawings of the 1990s. Once the calligraphic drawings and paintings afforded Marden a new field of inspiration and operation, the panoply of variations to follow in the 1990s and 2000s engendered masterpieces of organic, rhythmic and atmospheric beauty.