Agnes Martin: The mind knows what the eye has not seen

The MacKenzie Art Gallery is pleased to be bringing the work of internationally recognized artist Agnes Martin to her home province of Saskatchewan with the opening of its new exhibition, Agnes Martin: The mind knows what the eye has not seen.

Co-produced by the MacKenzie with the Esker Foundation in Calgary, the exhibition runs from January 25 until April 28 and includes complimentary screenings in the Gallery’s Shumiatcher Theatre of two films: Gabriel (Agnes Martin, 1976) and With My Back to the World (Mary Lance, 2007). There will be an opening reception and talk with guest curator Bruce Hugh Russell on Friday, January 25 at 8:00 PM in the Shumiatcher Theatre.

Offering an unprecedented focus on Martin’s print works, in addition to selected paintings that exist in dialogue with the prints, this exhibition is curated by Bruce Hugh Russell and Naomi Potter with Elizabeth Diggon. A parallel collection of ephemera and source material introduces Martin’s life and work, focusing on her on-going relationship to Canada – her childhood in Macklin and then Lumsden, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, as well as her later travels in Canada.

“We are so pleased to be able to bring the work of Agnes Martin to Saskatchewan,” says Executive Director and CEO of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Anthony Kiendl, “particularly because her pieces are very difficult to reproduce; her work has to be seen in person to be appreciated. Her sensitivity in material, colour, and composition change subtly with every viewing.”

Agnes Martin (b. 1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan; d. 2004, New Mexico) is one of the most revered artists of the 20th century, celebrated for her minimal paintings that reveal her ongoing meditation on line, stripes, and the grid; for her poetic and spiritual writing; and for her ascetically solitary approach to artmaking. Shown alongside the prints are three of Martin’s paintings, two of which have never been shown publicly in Canada, to provide a more complete picture of her corpus of work and to establish a dialogue between the prints and the medium for which Martin is best known.This is the first time Martin's prints have been assembled as the basis for an exhibition.

“Martin’s work draws on her upbringing in Saskatchewan, not so much in terms of landscape, but in terms of her belief in the value of work and the emotions evoked by space,” says Head Curator of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Timothy Long. “Although she moved to the United States as a young adult, Saskatchewan remained her spiritual home and she returned here many times at key points in her life.”

Martin, who eventually settled in New York after moving to the United States, initially gained artistic notoriety in the 1960s for her signature style of six-foot-square canvases featuring a lightly-drawn graphite grid.

In 1967, Agnes Martin unequivocally abandoned painting, gave up her New York studio, and, with a white pick-up truck and an Airstream trailer, set out on a road trip. She travelled first to California, and then to her birthplace in Saskatchewan, before finally settling in the Southwestern United States, where she had lived prior to her decade-long sojourn in New York. Martin would live in New Mexico for the rest of her life.

Martin was persistent in her pursuit of geometric perfection, writing, in preparation for a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1973: “We must surrender the idea that this perfection that we see in the mind or before our eyes is obtainable or attainable. It is really far from us. We are no more capable of having it than the infant that tries to eat it. But our happiness lies in our moments of awareness of it.”

In reimagining the role of a public art gallery, the MacKenzie Art Gallery seeks to become an immersive, community-engaged centre for art, focusing on visitors and artists, Indigenous culture and diversity, engaging people in transformative experiences of the world through art.

The MacKenzie is grateful for the support of the South Saskatchewan Community Foundation; Canada Council for the Arts; Saskatchewan Arts Board; SaskCulture; the City of Regina; University of Regina.-30-About Agnes Martin:Agnes Martin (b. 1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan; d. 2004, New Mexico) is among the most celebrated abstract painters of the 20th century. Martin studied Fine Arts and Arts Education at Columbia University, New York, receiving her Bachelor’s degree in 1942, before returning to Columbia to complete a Master of Arts in 1952. Martin initially gained notoriety in New York in the 1960s for her meditative geometric paintings characterized by her ongoing study of line and the grid. In 1967, Martin abandoned artistic practice and left New York, eventually settling in Cuba, New Mexico. In 1973, Martin returned to art making with On a Clear Day, a suite of thirty gridded silkscreens, after which she began painting again in 1974.

Martin’s distinguished career included exhibitions at institutions across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Martin was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

In 1998, she was awarded the College Art Association Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as the National Medal of the Arts. She was given the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts Award in 2004. Martin painted until a few months before her death in 2004.