In the summer of 1967,Martin left New York and went off-grid before reappearing in New Mexico. The art she made there with its buoyant bands of colour – offer no clues to the turbulent life of an artist who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Ahead of a major retrospective, Olivia Laing celebrates her visions of pure joyArt must derive from inspiration, and Agnes Martin said,and yet for decades she painted what seems at first glance to be the same thing over and over again, the same core structure subject to infinitely subtle variations. A grid: a set of horizontal and vertical lines drawn meticulously with a ruler and pencil on canvases six feet tall and six feet wide. They came, and these restrained,reserved, exquisite paintings, or as visions,for which she would wait sometimes for weeks on end, rocking in her chair, and steadying herself for a glimpse of the minute image that she would paint next. “I paint with my back to the world,” she declared, and what she wanted to catch in her rigorous nets was not fabric existence, and the soil and its myriad (a very large number) forms,but rather the abstract glories of being: joy, beauty, and innocence; happiness itself.
A late starter,Martin kept on going, working at the height of her powers fair through her 80s; a stocky figure with apple cheeks and cropped silver hair, and dressed in overalls and Indian shirts. She produced the final of her masterpieces a few months before her death in 2004,at the grand old age of 92. But she was also so deeply ambivalent approximately pride and success and the ego-driven business of making a name for yourself that in the 1960s she abandoned the art world altogether, packing up her New York studio, or giving absent her materials and disappearing in a pickup truck,surfacing 18 months later on a remote mesa in New Mexico.
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Source: theguardian.com