Pace Gallery celebrates 65 years with Agnes Martin's radiant Innocent Love series in New York

NEW YORK, NY.— Pace is presenting an exhibition of paintings from Agnes Martin’s Innocent Love series at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. On view from November 7 to December 20, this is the final show organized as part of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, celebrating an artist who has been integral to the gallery for much of its history.

The presentation features 13 canvases created by Martin in the later years of her life—between the late 1990s and early 2000s—in which she took up new experimentations with the phenomenological possibilities of color to express the unbridled imagination of childhood. This exhibition is accompanied by a new collection of Martin’s writings from Pace Publishing.

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century and a progenitor of Minimalism, Martin pursued a vision of pure truth and beauty through her practice. Using mathematical calculations, she forged meticulous abstract compositions in intricate grids and bands of alternating colors. She spent much of her life in New Mexico, maintaining an ascetic, largely solitary existence for many years—these circumstances allowed her to fully immerse in philosophies of Zen Buddhism that had animated her practice from its outset and in explorations of space, form, and metaphysics. Dedicating her life and work to articulating transcendence through seemingly simple forms, Martin once wrote that “artwork comes straight through a free mind—an open mind.”

Pace, which began representing Martin in 1975, has mounted nearly 30 presentations of her work since. The gallery’s exhibition of Martin’s Innocent Love paintings sheds new light on the most important series she produced in the last decade of her life. Guided by her enduring belief that beauty resides deep within the self, she set out, in the late 1990s, to make a group of works that celebrate the freedom of a child’s mind. The sense of energy and purpose that motivated her to create her Innocent Love paintings is reflected in the works’ bright colors and their looser, more syncopated geometries. These were also the first works she titled since the mid-1980s, bearing names like Tranquility, Gratitude, Blessings, and I Love Love. This group of radiant canvases reflects Martin’s intense, lifelong interest in the spiritual essence of painting and her conviction that beauty is untethered to any single subject or meaning.

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912, Martin studied painting at the University of New Mexico between 1946 and 1948. In the early 1950s—when she established herself in the New York art world—she earned a master’s degree from the Teachers College at Columbia University, where she engaged with Buddhist thought through lectures by writer Jiddu Krishnamurti and Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki. During this time, she lived in the city’s storied Coenties Slip and associated with fellow artists like Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ad Reinhardt, presenting her first solo exhibition in the city with Betty Parsons Gallery in 1958. Her career accelerated in the 1960s, when she was included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as a seminal exhibition of minimalist art co-organized by Robert Smithson and Virginia Dwan at Dwan Gallery.

After a hiatus from painting—and the limelight of New York—that Martin initiated in 1967, she had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. The show, titled On a Clear Day, featured 30 screen prints based on drawings produced in 1972. It was during the 1960s that Martin began her decades-long friendship with Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher, who met the artist at the Coenties Slip in New York and visited her in New Mexico before mounting her first show with the gallery in 1975—a presentation of new paintings with horizontal and vertical bands of pastel pink and blue. In the following decades, up until her death in 2004, Martin would continue explorations of this kind, using acrylic, watercolor, and graphite to investigate the sensorial possibilities of line and color and to express absolute truth through pure abstraction.