Dated between 2020 and 2023, the artworks in Brice Marden: Let the painting make you at Gagosian are the artist’s last ones. In 2017, Marden, who died this August at the age of 84, realized that he had rectal most cancers. When requested about this, he instructed the New York Times in 2019, “[it] hasn’t made me work any otherwise. It’s simply an additional factor to consider.” Marden, who has typically been credited with rejuvenating portray within the mid-Sixties, knew that portray and drawing had been bodily acts for him, the results of actions made by the hand, wrist, arm, and energetic physique. Greater than 30 years in the past, in a prescient interview with the artist Pat Steir printed in a brochure for the 1991–1992 exhibition Brice Marden: Chilly Mountain at Dia Chelsea, Marden acknowledged: “I’m 5’8 1/2″, and I weigh this a lot, and I’m left handed, and I’m a sure age. That has an enormous impact on what a factor appears like. The type of mark I could make bodily.”
And in a 2015 dialog concerning the Nevis Stele collection (2007–15), Marden instructed the artist Matt Connors, “I’m attending to the purpose the place I do issues I ordinarily wouldn’t have allowed myself to do. Now I’m slightly bit older, so I determine I can do something I need.”
I considered these statements, and the sense of freedom Marden appears to have felt within the final years of his life whereas standing in a gallery surrounded by six work, all measuring 72 by 96 inches and dated 2022 to 2023. I reviewed his two most recent New York exhibitions at Gagosian, and beginning in 2017, a change clearly started to happen in his work. That 12 months, he accomplished 10 vertical work measuring 96 by 72 inches, every utilizing a special model of terre verte (inexperienced earth) and divided right into a sq. atop a horizontal band.
In these works, Marden let go of his need for management and perfection with out surrendering his self-imposed restraints, corresponding to a grid. Merging an acute sense of colour, geometry, and line with the assist, these restraints enabled him to be expressive with out turning into expressionistic. As an alternative of altering his course of when he acknowledged that point was now not as ample it had been, he continued to color giant, acknowledging that the shape his consideration would take had modified.
The thinly painted, gauzy pink “Lingerie” (2022–23) is an outlier in each this exhibition and Marden’s oeuvre. A sensualist in colour and fleshy surfaces, he had by no means saturated the image aircraft in pink earlier than, nor had he used such an explicitly erotic title. Accomplished close to the top of his life, he let himself enter new territory. The pink floor, which recollects stain portray, is denser in some areas than others, whereas the grey, muted purple, and blue traces range in thickness and dangle, drip, and fade, stirring up associations that Marden — to his credit score — by no means tried to pin down. The floor feels much less painted than caressed. By his earlier requirements, “Lingerie” may appear unfinished or incomplete, however that incompleteness imparts a tenderness and vulnerability to the portray. This is among the work’s strengths. The getting older physique and erotic recollections are integral to it.
The work “Dance” and “Chalk” (2013–21), the latter of which was proven within the 2021 exhibition, are in dialogue. “Chalk,” which shares one thing with the Terre Verte collection, is cut up right into a six-by-six-foot sq. and a two-by-six foot band beneath it. Utilizing a pencil, Marden divided the sq. right into a grid of 225 tiny squares and inside every he painted an irregular form in a whitish define towards a purple sandstone floor. Over this, he drew a number of linear configurations in Chinese language purple and ghostly white. The band under is painted a green-infused mustard yellow — obliquely complimentary colours. The band stirs up associations with Chinese language scroll portray, wherein the scroll is mounted on yellow silk. The portray is a palimpsest wherein every layer and mark stays comparatively intact, but the purple drips working down the yellow floor convey impermanence and alter.
In “Dance,” Marden drew vertical rows of glyph-like shapes in charcoal. The addition of skinny washes of mustard yellow dissolved among the shapes, notably within the portray’s decrease proper hand facet. Whereas, in “Chalk,” Marden remoted the drips (or indicators of disintegration) from the higher a part of the portray, he does one thing totally different and extra radical in “Dance.” The partial obliteration of the charcoal glyphs suggests time’s effacing energy. Over this compression of darkish line and yellow washes, the artist drew vertical configurations of open shapes and dangling traces in Chinese language purple a number of rows in from the portray’s left edge. The density of the road adjustments and none of them are solidly coloured. What we see is a floor stuffed with marks which are dissolving, disintegrating, and fading.
Within the gallery containing the drawings and a horizontal portray divided into seven separate colours, I used to be notably drawn to a bunch of 4 drawings, every performed in a single colour (inexperienced, blue, yellow, and violet). In these works, Marden actually marked and formed his passage by means of time within the drawings’ 17 vertical rows of glyph-like shapes. At no level does he repeat himself or come throughout as mechanical. He was concentrating on the right here and now, whilst time was pulling him ahead. Realizing that he may do something he wished, Marden selected to remain true to — as he titled one portray — the “marrow” of who he was, a person whose physique was spiraling uncontrolled.
Brice Marden: Let the painting make you continues at Gagosian (980 Madison Avenue, Higher East Facet, Manhattan) by means of December 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.