Artist

Agnes Martin

1912–2004 · Canadian-American

Agnes Martin painted grids and pale bands of colour that seem, at a distance, to be nothing, and up close to hold a great deal. Born in Saskatchewan and shaped by the New Mexico high desert, she left the New York art world in 1967 and moved to a mesa outside Cuba, New Mexico, where she lived and painted almost until her death in 2004.

Martin drew her grids by hand in graphite over thin acrylic washes on square canvases, waiting between paintings for what she called "inspiration" — an image that would arrive complete. She rejected the label Minimalist and aligned herself with the Abstract Expressionists of her generation.