Beauty is the mystery of life.
Is in not just in the eye. It is in the mind.
It is our positive response to life.
– 1989, Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin: Moments of Perfection is the first exhibition in Korea of a North American artist whose pursuit of pure abstraction was informed by Zen Buddhism and Taoism that she engaged with from her student years. Her abstract works coincide with the development of monochrome painting – Dansaekhwa – in Korea, and audiences will, for the first time, be able to focus on Martin’s work from an Eastern perspective. 

This exhibition begins its exploration of Martin’s career in 1955 when she began to shed obvious figurative references from her compositions. Her painting moved from a vocabulary of organic and biomorphic shapes to a more formal and geometric language, often featuring circles, triangles, and rectangles. By the end of the 1950s Martin had removed all figurative references from her compositions and was experimenting with different linear and grid formats. The Tree, 1964, is among her most radical and minimal works from this period.

In 1967 Martin stopped painting for over half a decade, leaving New York to travel alone before retreating to the relative solitude of New Mexico. On her return to the studio in 1974 she worked in much the same manner for the three decades until her death in 2004. During these decades Martin found her imagery through what she called ‘inspiration’, the images for her paintings coming to her through a form of meditation. While standardizing the size of her canvases and reducing her tools and materials to a minimum she found ‘perfection’ in the infinite number of variations she could achieve.

The extensive series of grey-monochrome canvases Martin painted between 1977 and 1992 are amongst the most enigmatic and beautiful of Martin’s work and a careful selection of eight contrasting canvases will represent, and evoke, the myriad formal, tonal and textual variations Martin achieved within her self-imposed restrictions. 

Paintings from the last decade of Martin’s life provide a final focus to the exhibition. In 1993 Martin moved into a retirement home in Taos, New Mexico, and while continuing to visit her studio every day she worked on a slightly reduced scale more suited to her diminishing physical strength. Martin often spoke of how her late images were conceived during moments of quiet meditation. ‘Innocent Love’, 1999 represents the last and probably the most sustained serial works in Agnes Martin’s career. In contrast to the opacity of so many of the grey paintings, Martin’s ‘Innocent Love’ paintings are both translucent and luminescent, with joyous, celebratory titles.

Martin’s paintings offer the viewer an opportunity for slow looking – for exploring, in silence, the wash of colour, the soft blurring of the edges, and the febrile touch of her pencil – evidence of her meticulous process. Martin asserted that ‘The value of art is in the observer’, and she likened the experience of looking at her art to listening to music. When she did comment on the experience of looking at a single work, she compared it to watching the ebb and flow of waves on the sea or the movement of the clouds across the sky, always changing but also essentially the same: repetitive, meditative, timeless, capable of generating happiness, of creating for Martin – and for the viewer – ‘moments of perfection’.