Brice Marden

Brice Marden (1938–2023) continuously refined and extended the traditions of lyrical abstraction. Experimenting with self-imposed rules, limits, and processes, and drawing inspiration from his extensive travels, Marden brought together the diagrammatic formulations of Minimalism, the immediacy of Abstract Expressionism, and the intuitive gesture of calligraphy in his exploration of gesture, line, and color.

Born in Bronxville, New York, Marden received an MFA from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, where his teachers included the painters Alex Katz and Jon Schueler. Marden’s paintings from the 1960s include subtle, shimmering monochromes in gray tones, sometimes assembled into multipanel works. In the 1980s Marden began to incorporate organic, intersecting lines, creating rhythmic patterns over fields of color. Exploring these winding lines, he experimented with blank space, erasure, and references to the natural world. He sought to create a mystical experience through the creation of elusive abstract spaces. As his many themes and techniques have overlapped, Marden brought them together in cohesive, often multipart works, which he has described as his “summation paintings.”

Source: Gagosian