Brice Marden. New Paintings

1062 North Orange Grove
7818 Santa Monica Boulevard

Brice Marden. New Paintings
23.01.2016 - 23.04.2016

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Brice Marden New Paintings in his galleries at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard. This is only the second one-person exhibition of Marden’s paintings in Los Angeles, and the first in over thirty years.

The exhibition includes fourteen calligraphic and monochromatic paintings made between 2007 and 2015, five of which are being shown for the first time. Marden’s return to the monochrome is a significant development for an artist who has spent the past three decades engaged with the calligraphic line.

Eastern Moss (2012–15) is a thirteen-foot-wide painting in nine small monochrome panels, each a different shade of terre verte, or green earth, a pigment commonly used during the Renaissance. Terre verte also figures in two large single-panel monochrome canvases whose composition — a rectangle or square resting on a smaller rectangle — recalls Marden’s early monochromes, the bottom area showing the many layers used to build up the painting.

This same composition appears in four of the five panels in the exhibition’s largest painting, Uphill with Center, which is based on the four seasons, a theme Marden first explored forty years ago. This sixteen-foot-wide painting marks the first time the artist has combined calligraphic and monochromatic panels in the same painting.

Just as Marden’s experience with line has altered his new monochromes, the reverse is also true: “What’s happening with the monochromatic paintings is that I’m getting certain colors I never got. And now I can use those things in the calligraphic paintings.” This shift is evident in the Nevis Stele paintings (2007–15). With a palette of muted reds, blues, greens, and grays, these calligraphic canvases are inspired by Chinese stone carvings dating back to AD 800.

Accompanying the exhibition is a clothbound catalogue featuring an interview by artist Matt Connors and full-color reproductions of over sixty works.

Brice Marden (born 1938) lives and works in New York. His work was the subject of a 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. He has also had one-person exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Gallery in London.