拍品 18
  • 18

艾格妮斯·馬丁

估價
1,500,000 - 2,000,000 USD
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招標截止

描述

  • Agnes Martin
  • 《無題 #0》
  • 款識:畫家簽名並紀年1975(背面)
  • 壓克力顏料、石墨畫布
  • 72 x 72英寸;182.9 x 182.9公分

來源

Pace Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Meriden
Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris
Christie's, New York, November 8, 2005, Lot 58
Acquired by the present owner from the above

展覽

New York, The Pace Gallery, Agnes Martin: Recent Paintings, May 1976
Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, December 1986 - January 1988, not illustrated
Paris, Yvon Lambert Gallery, Agnes Martin: Peintures 1975-1986, April - May 1987
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, The Spirit of White, November 2003 - March 2004, p. 57, illustrated in color
Beacon, Dia: Beacon, To The Islands: Agnes Martin's Paintings 1974-1979, December 2005 - June 2006

Condition

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a metal strip frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

拍品資料及來源

"My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything -- no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form."  (Agnes Martin quoted in Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Agnes Martin: The Nineties and Beyond, 2002, pp. 14-15)

After her relocation from New York to New Mexico that occasioned a seven year hiatus from painting, Agnes Martin completed Untitled #0 in 1975; it is at once extraordinarily minimalist and controlled – consistent with her signature approach – and yet, in its bold venture into color, rapturous with a newly-discovered understanding and intuitive mastery of visual cadences. The New Mexico desert, a location that echoed the sparse and hazy sky-and-horizon-colored surfaces of her pictures, nourished not only a newer and subtler palette, but also the ever more profound expansiveness and tranquility on her canvases.

On her signature 72-by-72 inch canvas, precisely spaced bands and repeated alternating colors, in their graceful simplicity, recall the delicate poetry of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Martin stripped down any notion of composition and perspective to its bare bones and purged painting’s ego and materiality in order to make room for the purest form of perfection and the sublime. The appearance of Untitled #0 is reduced to the essence of objective clarity, the experience of which at once overcomes tangible passions and strives for intangible truth. Simultaneously patient and relentless, Martin’s formal reduction and repetition – in line with the Taoist philosophy that influenced much of her career – is a spiritual gesture, aiming at unearthing the transcendental and the absolute beyond that which is readily perceivable by our senses. The present work demonstrates Martin’s consummate achievement of both the ineffable and the concrete; Untitled #0 confronts the viewer with ideas that are easy to identify but impossible to define, leaving us mute in front of the painting yet quietly engaged in a dialogue with its order and serenity.

Martin thought of geometry as an appropriate vehicle for spiritual content and her manipulation of the logic of geometry served a higher pursuit of a classical perfection, which the artist considered absent from nature and only held in the mind. The painting’s orderly composition is guided by objective standards and abstract rules – mathematical to be precise. Visually, what underlies this order is the implication of infinity reinforcing the profound sense of renewal. In their repetition, the bands and graphite lines seem to recede out of focus, subtly liberating the colors to shimmer freely against one another, forming a landscape, or perhaps the specter of a landscape. In Untitled #0, the faint peachy pinks palpitate against the light blue background, coalescing into a mirage-like image shrouded by mist, simultaneously dimming and brightening, and constantly in motion.  With its rigid mathematical and material basis, the painting seems always ready to leap into that indefinable absolute.

However, the leap into the absolute takes more than just the artist’s rigidity of method; it takes a temporal dimension as well. There’s a definite slowness in both the painting’s visual content and the experience of it. The faintly visible pencil marks on the gessoed surface– the obvious traces of the artist’s hand – indicate a temporal dimension in the process of creation;  the surprising sense of depth constructed by the varying colors and bands requires time for the viewer to perceive, absorb and comprehend, which implies a temporal dimension in the process of reception. With ethereal radiance and lyrical beauty, Martin’s Untitled #0 exudes a kind of thoughtfulness – or thoughtlessness, borrowing from Eastern philosophy – that requires patience, a much-needed oasis in our time.