AGNESMARTIN(1912-2004)Untitled #19.Signed and dated "a.martin 1995" on the reverse. Acrylic and graphite on canvas.60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm).Executed in 1995.Provenance
Pace Wildenstein, New York"All artwork is about beauty; all positive work represents it and celebrates it. All negative art protests the lack of beauty in our lives. When a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. Beauty is an awareness in the mind. It is a mental and emotional response that we make. We respond to life as though it were perfect. When we go into a forest we do not see the fallen rotting trees. We are inspired by a multitude of uprising trees. We even hear a silence when it is not really silent. When we see a new born baby we say it is beautiful – perfect. The goal of life is happiness and to respond to life as though it were perfect is the way to happiness"
(Agnes Martin, "Beauty Is The Mystery of Life", El Palacio, 95 (Fall-Winter 1989), pp. 9-23).

In the mid-1960s, Agnes Martin was applauded as a herald of the cool geometric Minimalism that was emerging in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. Martin, however, personally declined the connection, for she regarded the Minimalist approach as impersonal and dispassionate; her own abstractions were a combination of ideal geometry and the lightest touch of the artist's hand to achieve a pitch of emotion and feeling. While the formal regularity of Martin's work led her to be grouped with the Minimalists, she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models.

Unlike the more rigidly formulaic art of much Minimalist work, there is nothing systematic about Martin's use of the grid; the arrangement of coordinates shifts in scale and rhythm from work to work. Martin's compositions, such as in present lot Untitled #19, are emphatically nonhierarchical; no one component is privileged over another. The delicacy of Martin's style, promoted by the artist's frequent use of light graphite lines and cool tones such as pale pinks, blues and grays, masks her impulse toward stringent formal equality. Her paintings must be read as unitary entities, not as assemblies of single elements. This does not mitigate the complexity of their construction, however. The freely drawn grids, fragile, almost dissolving lines, and hushed tones of the paintings require quiet contemplation in order for the subtleties of their individual compositions to be revealed. Considered very carefully and close-up, the whole surfaces of Martin's paintings come alive. Every detail counts, as the viewer is gripped by an intricate and endlessly fascinating interplay of thinly layered bands and strokes of paint.

While Martin uses a ruler to apply the delicate lines on her canvases, these bands of color, gently painted across the woven terrain of the canvas create a subtle and sensuous irregularity in the line. Invariably these lines, although ostensibly straight and regular, take on a life of their own, establishing a rhythmic buzz across the surface of the picture, an experience which Martin describes as "making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance…" (L. Alloway, Agnes Martin, Philadelphia 1973, p. 9). The sense of order and geometry that was apparent initially becomes mutable and illusive, creating an almost meditative feeling, and within this "dissonance" an equilibrium is revealed bringing the viewer to a state in which they begin to actually see. This is Martin's ultimate goal, to provide the viewer with an aesthetic vocabulary expressing the truths of life, centered on the sublimity of reality, perfection and transcendent reality.