"It’s tempting to read these formidable tensions and turbulences into the paintings: to convert the grid into a closet or cell, a system of traps or an endless maze. But Martin was adamant that personal experience had nothing to do with her works. In her copious writing she was formidably insistent about what meanings they did and didn’t contain: they did not embrace ideas, and certainly not personal emotions or biographical elements. She was passionately opposed to critical readings, going so far as to cancel a prestigious retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1980 because they insisted on a catalogue. The paintings were the thing: the paintings and the sublime responses they engendered in the viewer."
"Over the years, a surprising number of Martin’s paintings have been vandalised. One viewer used as their weapon an ice cream cone. Another attacked with green crayon, while at a show in Germany, nationalists hurled rubbish. The grids in particular seem to attract embellishment. Martin herself thought it was narcissistic, a kind of horror vacui. “You know,” she said ruefully, “people just can’t stand that those are all empty squares.” "
link: Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert
images: Zwirner & Wirth