S erene, deliberate, and quietly radical — Agnes Martin’s The Garden radiates a meditative energy that resists interpretation yet compels reflection. Painted amid the vast light of New Mexico, the work’s soft pinks and blues evoke the shifting skies and desert plains that surrounded her. Here, Martin allowed her brushwork to surface, breaking from her usual restraint to reveal a subtler, more human hand. Beneath the calm symmetry lies a tension between precision and imperfection — a harmony that defines her lifelong pursuit of beauty as a state of mind rather than form.
Offered from The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at Sotheby’s on 18 November, The Garden stands as a defining moment in Martin’s mature practice — a visual language of stillness, emotion, and quiet power. From her early years in New York’s Coenties Slip to her final decades in Taos, Martin sought to express not what she saw, but what she felt. This luminous composition, exhibited at the Guggenheim and celebrated as a late-career masterpiece, invites us to pause, to look closely, and to sense the profound calm at the center of her art.
