Photo Courtesy Rick Romancito

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind.  In our minds there is an awareness of perfection.

–Agnes Martin   (El Palacio, 1989)

Agnes Martin (b. 1912) has been recognized as one of this county's leading artists from the time of her emergence as a vital presence of the New York art scene in the 1950s.  More recently, she was honored with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1992) and the Golden Lion award at one of the world's best known international art shows, La Biennale Di Venezian (1997).  The first museum to show Martin's work was the Harwood in 1947.  

A native of Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, Martin moved to the U.S. in 1931.  Her introduction to Taos began with graduate art studies at the University of New Mexico's Summer Field School of Art in Taos and continued with a period of living in the community between 1952 and 1957. After a period in New York, she returned to New Mexico in 1968 and to Taos in 1992. Martin has described her paintings as starting with a visual image of the work before actually putting paint to canvas. She then concentrates on getting the scale and proportions right. The paintings in this exhibition were shown at the Harwood in 1994 and later at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The artist made a gift of them to the Harwood which has constructed this gallery specifically to house them.The seven paintings are abstractions, without objective subject matter but infused with the artist's devotion and lifetime commitment to finding truth on a deep, transcendental level.
 
Visit www.harwoodmuseum.org for more information.