2023-08-14 15:06:50
A figure of abstraction, former assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, he developed an emotional and chromatic style inspired by his many travels, particularly in Asia.
Champion of an abstraction that is alternately geometric and sinuous, with a palette that is first sharp and then full of muted nuances, Brice Marden has deployed, for more than half a century, a sensitive, tonic painting full of contemplative serenity. He died on August 9, his daughter announced, at his home in Tivoli, New York, at the age of 84.
After studying at the Boston School of Art in the early 1960s, he moved to New York and the bohemian district of Greenwich Village where he soon exhibited, in a gallery, in 1966, his first monochromes, painted with a mixture of beeswax and oil, on diptychs or triptychs, displaying a lustrous and velvety surface. Despite the mute and minimalist stiffness of the composition, his works remain in his eyes “very emotional paintings which one should not admire for technical or intellectual reasons but which one must experience”.
Complex and fleeting architecture
A goal best embodied by his paintings of the 1980s, where sinuous and meandering lines are invited to survey the canvas in all directions. Come and lick the edges while undulating before returning to the center. And never cease, with an organic fluidity, to restore to the artist’s gesture the first place and, to the palette, the softness of a morning light. Because the landscape and the visual impressions born of its contemplation (especially in the masterful series, Cold Mountain) constitute the background of this work of thwarted abstraction. Oriental calligraphy, which Marden deepened his knowledge of during trips to Asia, is the other source of inspiration for his motifs, the curls and tendrils of which reveal the wanderings and hesitations of the artist at work.
After a first retrospective in 1975 at the Guggenheim Museum, the one dedicated to him by the MoMa in 2006, marks a return to flat areas without curves, but with a complicated composition where the assembly of monochrome panels forms complex architectures full of pitfalls, tunnels and porticos extending the fleeting and floating perspective of Brice Marden’s work.
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