“Ultimately I’m using the painting as a sounding board for the spirit. . . . You can be painting and go into a place where thought stops—where you can just be and it just comes out. . . . I present it as an open situation rather than a closed situation. “

—Brice Marden

Brice Marden
 (1938 – 2023)

No.4, 1983

Color screenprint on Japanese handmade Mino Kozo Kizuki paper 

28 / 32

38 1/4 x 29 inches, sheet;  43 1/2 x 34 inches, framed

Signed, dated and numbered lower center

Provenance:
Private collection, New York
Private collection, Santa Fe

Although widely known for his minimalistic drawings and paintings, Nicholas Brice Marden Jr. (October 15, 1938 – August 9, 2023)   developed his own distinctive style, incorporating aspects of Lyrical Abstraction,  the immediacy of Abstract Expressionism, and the intuitive gesture of calligraphy in his exploration of gesture, line, and color.

Born in Bronxville, New York, Marden attended Florida Southern College from 1957 to 1958 before earning his B.F.A. in 1961 from Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts. He finished his MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1963, along with fellow students Alex Katz, Richard Serra and Chuck Close.

In 1964, his exposure to the art of Jasper Johns—while employed as a guard at the Jewish Museum in New York during an important Johns exhibition— fostered his dedication to geometric formats. Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, and Robert Rauschenberg, for whom he worked as an assistant in the mid-1960s, were other notable influences. Minimalism was then the dominant idiom, and while Marden borrowed its formal rigor and muted palette, he did so to expressive ends.

He was given his first solo show in 1966 at the Bykert Gallery in New York, after which he developed his practice of constructing multiple-panel paintings. In many of these works, Marden employed encaustic, a medium that suspends pigment in oil and beeswax, giving his surfaces a lustrous and diaphanous quality (e.g., D’après la marquise de la Solana, 1969). The usually narrow range of shades in these works provided a subtle but surprisingly intense comment on colour.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were his most formative years. While teaching painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1969 to 1974, Marden concurrently showed his work in Europe for the first time in a solo exhibition held at the gallery of Yvon Lambert in the fall of 1969. In 1972, he took part in Documenta 5 in Kassel and in 1973 he was represented in the Whitney Biennial in New York. 

In 1975, Marden was honored with his first retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

In the early 1970s, Marden traveled with his wife Helen to Greece where he visited Hydra, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. The influence of Hydra on Marden’s work was immediately palpable as his compositions became grander in scale and more ambitious in construction.

In 1981, Marden dispensed with his wax-based painting technique and sought a medium that would most directly convey color. To this end, Marden developed a new technique of mixing terpineol with oil to produce a pigment that dries as flat to the surface as possible, which allowed the viewer to perceive pure color with a physicality previously unseen in his paintings.

Long active as a printmaker and draftsman, Marden in the mid-1980s began to experiment with more gestural brushwork and a more calligraphic use of line. Spidery lines sweeping across coloured fields seemed a departure from his earlier concerns, though both bodies of work were united by their richly worked surfaces. 

Marden continued to work in the 21st century, making large-scale multipaneled pieces, as in The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third Version (2000–06), and returning to monochrome painting. In such works as Holbein and Williamsburg (both 2016–17), he explored the possibilities of terre verte, a natural green pigment used in the Renaissance to paint the undertones of flesh. 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which is home to a number of Marden’s paintings, drawings, and prints, organized a retrospective of his art in 2006. 

Marden passed away at the age of 84 in Tivoli, New York. 

Marden has been widely collected by leading art institutions, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art , the Museum of Modern Aert and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Glenstone Museum, Maryland; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Tate Modern, London; the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa; and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, among many others.

biographical sources: Sotheby’s; MoMA; Whtiney Museum; Gagosian Gallery; others