CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/24/2022

A poetic meditation on color in Agnes Martin's paintings

"Untitled #4" (1975) is reproduced from Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color, the meditative and beautifully-designed new release from Pace Publishing. A deep examination of color in a selection of the artist's New Mexico paintings, this concise volume includes evocative texts and poems by Durga Chew-Bose, Olivia Laing, Bruce Hainley, Andria Hickey, Marc Glimcher and Martin herself. "Martin once talked of wanting a viewer to be able to step inside her paintings, to access the pure land she’d documented and secured," Laing writes. "But part of the extraordinary nature of her work is that it also attests to the enormous danger, risk, labor that such a vision required. This two-step between dark storm and sunny uplands—which can be felt in even the lightest and most ardent, or on the other hand, gravest and most weighty of her paintings—feels like a precise visual working of Woolf’s and Dickinson’s equations on loneliness, its appalling cost and incalculable benefits. It’s never quite solved, perhaps never quite solvable, the tension between risk and reward unsettled and electrifying."