Floor 4: Brice Marden (exiting Flavin)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Brice Marden Gallery. Two of the large paintings here feature ribbon-like marks that meander and loop across the canvas.
You've entered from the back left corner of this small square gallery, facing the far, front wall. The gallery has three paintings and an artist panel with a video about Marden, which is immediately to your right. To access the audio, use the handheld listening device attached to the panel.
The exit to the Agnes Martin Gallery is in the middle of the front wall of the gallery. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
The exit to Richard Serra Gallery is in the front right corner of the gallery, to the right of the Agnes Martin Gallery, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light."
—Brice Marden, 1991
Brice Marden
Born 1938, Bronxville, New York; died 2023, Tivoli, New York
Brice Marden first gained recognition in the mid-1960s for monochrome paintings that drew comparisons to the minimal, geometric work of other artists of his generation, but were set apart by their sensuous surfaces and subtle colors. In the late 1980s, he traveled to South and Southeast Asia and encountered Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. These experiences, along with an engagement with Taoism and Zen Buddhism, inspired him to adopt a more gestural approach, with allover patterns of fluid lines. While always insisting on the material, two-dimensional aspects of painting, Marden also believed it had a mystical power—calling it "a sounding board for the spirit."
Related Media
Transcript
Brice Marden:
I've been working in this studio for about ten years. There's a very beautiful light up here coming off the river. I mean, sometimes the light is just like—you get this late afternoon light, which is just like, thrillingly special. So much of painting is just about light. The pigment is just some sort of substance which reacts to light. So you become more and more aware of the light you're in, and I don't try to self-consciously replicate it.
I spend a lot of time just wandering around the garden. I garden by attrition—that’s my hobby; it’s basically weeding the moss and trying to make these large patches of moss. And I like sort of large monochromatic areas. So I get this myrtle, which seems to be growing all out of the woods, so it's easy to just say, get me a lot of myrtle and we'll put it here. There’s myrtle, juniper, and bamboo, and moss.
While the problems in my work seem very formal—like, say, a very specific formal color situation—it's being much more influenced by naturalistic color that's around. This painting is just layers: layers of terre verte, you know, green earth paint. And it started out with—there were colors underneath. So that's how you get the variation in the values. But I'm just layering it with terre verte.
I was in here the other day, and I was just painting and thinking, I want this painting to be able to take me to something like paradise. And it can just be like instantaneous, you know—just be like, it's like this tiny little moment. But there is this moment of transferal. And, you know, I mean, that's what the arts do. You refer to it as paradise, you know, but call it whatever you want. I like the idea of paradise.
Objects
3 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1991–93
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1994
As its title indicates, The Sisters can be understood as an abstract portrait of the artist’s two daughters. The apricot and burgundy ribbons may at first suggest figures, but in the next moment they dissolve into the larger field of blue, gray, and yellow lines laid over the pale yellow background. The lines graze the edges of the canvas but always remain within the frame of the picture. This playful dance of expansion and containment, spontaneity and restraint, reflects Marden’s dynamic painting process while capturing the character of his young subjects.
Visual Description
An oil-on-linen painting about seven feet tall by five feet wide—higher than a tall adult but not as wide as their outstretched arms—is filled edge-to-edge with looping, continuous lines over a pale yellow ground. Thick, dark brown lines curve and meander across the surface, sometimes forming large, rounded enclosures and sometimes narrowing into tight bends, creating a loose framework that runs from top to bottom and repeatedly touches the edges. Interwoven with these are deep teal-blue bands—especially concentrated along the left side—snaking upward in long arcs and occasionally overlapping the brown paths.
Softer, semi-opaque white lines and washes sit beneath and between the darker strokes, adding layered depth and suggesting earlier routes or underdrawing-like tracks. Bright orange and golden-yellow lines weave through the center and right side. Some passages are more translucent and the pale yellow field underneath is visible. The painting is in a white frame.
Artwork Label Text
1996–97
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
In this painting, the flowing ribbons of color in The Sisters (nearby) have been transformed into more controlled, even bands that slowly meander around the surface. Marden drew inspiration from ancient Chinese epitaph tablets—carved stone memorials placed inside tombs—borrowing their square proportions and loosely basing the composition on written characters inscribed on their surfaces. Asian art and culture were important influences on Marden starting in the mid-1980s.
Visual Description
A nearly eight-foot-square, oil-on-linen painting—roughly the size of a single-car garage door—presents a network of thick, continuous, looping bands that interlace across a blue-gray surface. The background is a mottled field of grayish blue with visible brushwork and faint vertical and diagonal streaks. Over this ground, two ribbon colors—deep, dark green and pale yellow—snake across the canvas in broad, rounded curves, repeatedly crossing and running alongside one another. A paler, turquoise-blue line appears beneath or alongside the darker paths, especially around the center and lower left.
The lines create irregular, cell-like enclosures: a large, rounded loop occupies the lower right quadrant; a cluster of tighter loops and overlaps gathers at upper right; and a more compact set of interwoven curves sits at lower left. Near the center, the paths intersect in a loose knot of crossings, with the dark green band often appearing on top. Many of the ribbons press close to the edges and leave only small pockets of open background between their winding routes.
The canvas is hung directly on the wall without a frame, and a low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1968
Beeswax and oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1995
To create the dense, matte surface of early monochrome works such as this, Marden mixed oil paint with beeswax and turpentine. He applied the medium in layers, reworking it with a spatula or palette knife. Although evidence of his hand is nowhere near as visible as it would become in the calligraphic style he developed during the 1980s (on view nearby), traces of the painting's making remain. Notice how Marden left bare a one-inch strip of canvas along the bottom edge to preserve a record of drips and splatters.
Visual Description
A horizontally oriented painting—about the height of an average adult and wider than their outstretched arms—in beeswax and oil on canvas is composed of two vertical rectangular canvases that have been joined together at their sides. Each is painted a single color. The left panel is a flat, dark green plane with a cool, slightly gray cast, and the right panel is a dark charcoal field with a purplish-brown undertone. The painted surfaces are thick, waxy, and matte and contain subtle ridges and impressions from their making, as well as faint scuffs, small specks, and slightly more glossy areas. A narrow, unfinished strip runs across the bottom edge of both canvases. In this area, drips and tiny splatters of paint are visible over the exposed raw canvas.
The painting is unframed and its unpainted side edges, which have some residue of paint, are visible.
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.