NEW YORK.- The fourth in an ongoing series of exhibitions devoted to Agnes Martin’s work organized by Dia Art Foundation, "A Field of Vision: Paintings from the 1980s" will be on view at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, from August 3, 2006, through March 5, 2007. Dia’s exhibition of eighteen paintings from this significant period in Martin’s career is organized as part of the exhibition program at Dia:Beacon.

Dia’s retrospective began in May 2004 with "…going forward into unknown territory…," which featured works from the decade 1957 to 1967, when Martin lived and worked in New York City. The second installment, "…unknown territory…," highlighted paintings from the mid-1960s. "To The Islands," the third in the series, explored the period from 1974 through 1979, when Martin resumed painting after a hiatus. The latest exhibition in the series, "A Field of Vision," will be followed in 2007 by the fifth and final presentation dedicated to works made from the 1990s to her death in 2004.

"A Field of Vision" focuses on an exceptionally productive decade in Martin’s career. During the 1980s, she experimented to an unprecedented degree with the boundaries of geometric abstraction. Living again in New Mexico, where she had first settled in the late 1960s, Martin now worked in relative seclusion. Pushing the boundaries of her artistic practice, she increasingly explored the possibilities of surface and color, while retaining the format of the six-foot-square canvas first employed in the 1960s. Known for her continuous, allover grid paintings, in the1980s Martin concentrated on horizontal divisions of the canvas almost exclusively, finding ever-new permutations by dividing canvas with pencil lines and varying the choice of colors and tonal range in increasingly fine, calibrated sequences. Rejecting the translucent washes of faint color seen during earlier periods, she alternated between a palette of pale pastels and somber grays, as she layered paint to create more robust, opaque surfaces.

"A Field of Vision" will be installed in a trio of newly configured galleries at Dia:Beacon. A brochure with color images of Martin’s paintings and an essay by Dia Art Foundation curator Lynne Cooke will accompany the exhibition.

Dia Art Foundation’s collection of Agnes Martin’s work comprises some twenty paintings, which range from her formative works to her later canvases. Dia has received promised gifts and long-term loans from a variety of sources, including Lannan Foundation, Louise and Leonard Riggio, the artist, and anonymous donors. Among the highlights of these gifts is the Innocent Love series, a nine-part suite of paintings made specifically for Dia, on long-term loan from Lannan Foundation.