NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian is now going to present 'Let the painting make you', an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Brice Marden (1938–2023) opening today at 980 Madison Avenue in New York.

The exhibition features a group of large paintings that Marden made in his studio in Tivoli, New York, in 2023, along with sixteen recent drawings that he made on the Caribbean island of Nevis and in Marrakech, Morocco. The paintings are characterized by weblike linear networks that cover variously colored grounds, and the group has a raw, spontaneous look, showing Marden drawing on intuition honed over a lifetime. These final works convey his idea of letting the paintings “make” us.

Marden was inspired by a broad range of art historical sources and spiritual traditions, and by experience gleaned through extensive travel. Allied with references to the natural world, these resources inspired an open-ended approach to painting through which he transformed earthly material into transcendent compositions of shape, color, and texture.

Marden worked on the six large paintings in the exhibition simultaneously for about a year, while confined to a wheelchair. The compositions’ relatively free look when compared to those in These paintings are of themselves, his previous exhibition at Gagosian, in 2021, resonates with earlier series, reflecting a longstanding alternation in his practice between more and less controlled approaches to the image. Marden completed Untitled, a work comprised of seven monochrome panels each painted a different single color, a few days before his passing on August 10.

One of the things about art is that it is full of contradictions. The only rule is there are no rules. But everybody works by rules. You set up your own rules. —Brice Marden

Paul Galvez, in his catalogue essay, observes the way in which “any attempt at grounding, at secure focalization, is erased, overlapped, or canceled, all the better to ensnare every element in the flux of a planar web.” Tiffany Bell contextualizes this approach in terms of Marden “ending his conversations sooner, unveiling his layers of work. It is opening the door, allowing a closer look into his creative process. By willing himself to stop refining, towards the end of his career, we are seeing how it starts.”
Let the painting make you is accompanied by a new publication with a foreword by Larry Gagosian, texts by Tiffany Bell and Paul Galvez, and photographs by Helen and Mirabelle Marden.

Brice Marden was born in 1938 in Bronxville, New York, and died in 2023 in Tivoli, New York. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Tate, London; and Kunstmuseum Basel. Exhibitions include Cold Mountain, Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1991–92, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1992; Menil Collection, Houston, 1992; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1993; and Städtisches Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany, 1993); Work of the 1990s: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, Dallas Museum of Art (1999, traveled to Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, 1999; Miami Art Museum, 1999–2000; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2000); A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006, traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007; and Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2007); Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech, Morocco (2019); Think of Them as Spaces: Brice Marden’s Drawings, Menil Drawing Institute, Houston (2020, traveled to Kunstmuseum Basel, 2022), and Brice Marden and Greek Antiquities, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece (2022).

Gagosian
Brice Marden: Let the painting make you
November 2nd, 2023 – December 22nd, 2023
Opening reception: Thursday, November 2, 6–8pm