31 Dec Guggenheim: Agnes Martin
Working from home makes you realize that you have to make an effort to get out of the digital world and into the real world. It is so easy to think you know what is going on in your industry based on the images we see through our screens, but in reality if you aren’t living it, if you’re not out in it, you don’t really know. So go outside!
Yesterday, I went to the Guggenheim to see the Agnes Martin exhibit. It was the first time I was able to see her work up close. I couldn’t imagine a better setting for the minimalist artist. As you know, the Guggenheim is my favorite museum in New York, for the architecture alone. I would be happy just sitting in the museum without any art hanging inside…but that is a discussion for another day.
Back to Agnes Martin. Her simple art is both precise and organic, something you notice when examining her work closely. Her pencil lines are level and evenly spaced but when she introduces paint onto the canvas, you can see more of a natural movement in the way she fills the spaces between the lines with color.
I felt renewed after leaving the museum. Martin’s outlook on painting and life is very optimistic and gives me hope for 2017. She believed love was a positive, unifying force claiming, “Love is all around us, like air…” She also stated “I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at landscape… it’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in landscape. My response to nature is really a response the beauty.” When she painted she said her mind was free of thoughts, if she was thinking about something she made mistakes in her work. The creation of her work and the way she intended the viewers to see it sounds very meditative. This is how I felt.
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