Artist Brice Marden, whose abstract paintings defied easy categorization, died at home Wednesday in Tivoli, New York. The 84-year-old artist's daughter, Mirabelle Marden, announced the news on Instagram.
“Brice Marden was one of the greatest American artists, whose achievement in continuing and extending the tradition of painting has long been recognized and celebrated throughout the world. He was a painter with a rare perception of pleasure and poetry; always dedicated to gesture, to chance, to substance – the elementary questions of art,” said Larry Gagosian in an email to Artnet News. “It was an honor to share your masterful work with an international audience. This loss is profound and he will be missed.”
Marden's 60-year career began in 1963, when he graduated with an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Growing up at a time when abstract expressionism was giving way to pop art and minimalism, Marden was loosely grouped with the latter, but It didn’t fit perfectly into any movement.
“I felt much more in tune with abstract expressionism,” Marden told Bomb magazine in 1988. “The actual act of painting, the physicality of it, became the substance of abstract expressionism.”
After finishing school, the Westchester native moved to New York and became a security guard at the Jewish Museum. Watching the institution's 1964 Jasper Johns retrospective was an influential moment for the young Marden, who had his first solo exhibition two years later at Manhattan's Bykert Gallery.
With painting decidedly unfashionable, reviews for this inaugural ride, featuring thickly painted surfaces mixed with turpentine and beeswax, were mixed. Undeterred, Marden, now working as a studio assistant for Robert Rauschenberg, slowly made a name for himself with large, often monochrome canvases featuring flat, rectangular panels of color.
“People said 'painting is dead,'” Marden told Christie's in 2020. “It was my way of saying what can be done.”
With professional success, Marden was selected to exhibit at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, and had a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1975. Later accolades would include showing at the 1997 Venice Biennale.
Over the years, travel has been an important starting point for Marden's career, including trips to Italy, France, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. After a trip to Hydra in 1971, Marden and his wife bought a house and studio there, returning annually to the Greek island.
A visit to China in 1984 inspired Marden to begin introducing calligraphic-inspired gestural marks into his canvases and drawings, sometimes painting with tree branches dipped in paint. His well-known “Cold Mountain” series is named after the poetry of Tang dynasty hermit Han Shan.
Creating these layered canvases and their wavy, undulating lines was an additive and subtractive process, with Marden often building and scraping the paint until he was satisfied with the composition. “When a painting truly lives, has the right to exist with its own strengths and weaknesses, I consider it finished,” Marden said in the catalog for a 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
“When I put everything I can into her and she actually breathes, I stop. There are times when a job has passed before me and it has become something new to me, something I have never seen before; That’s ending on an exciting note.”
Source: Artnet News