Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, "Brice Marden: Attendants, Bears and Rocks," May-June 2002 New York, The Museum of Modern Art, "Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings," Oct 29, 2006–Jan 15, 2007

Attendants, Bears, and Rocks, essay by Jean-Pierre Criqui, New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2002, exh. cat., n.p. (illustrated). Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective, Gary Garrels. Essays by Richard Shiff, Brenda Richardson, and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro. Interview with the artist by Michael Duffy, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006, exh. cat., p. 266 (illustrated).

Michelangelo liberated the form from the marble. Picasso didn’t seek, he found. Or so they said. Did Mozart or Paul McCartney really invent their music, or were they simply given the password to the cloud storage of the sublime? Are artists inventors or discoverers? Are they geniuses or merely beneficiaries of a divine gift? Were psychedelic mushrooms an accident of evolution, or were they planted here with purpose? So many questions remain unresolved. I don’t know much about Brice Marden. I like his work a lot, but I’ve never read a book about him. I know he spent time on Hydra and, according to my dad’s friends, lost a lot of money and sometimes even artworks at poker games. They never thought to keep them. But one thing I do know: Brice was a channeler. He painted with a long stick, standing nearly five feet from the canvas or paper. That vacuum, between the electrical impulse of his hand and the surface, created an opening - a space that allowed whatever was up there to manifest down here. I know less about string theory and quantum entanglement than I do about Brice. But I’m pretty sure that through this gem (and thanks to Fair Warning!), you’re being offered a 29-by-20-inch panoramic view into the beautiful matrix that quietly governs our universe.

Fusing clarity with ambiguity and control with spontaneity, Brice Marden’s Untitled (Red and Green Drawing 1) reveals the artist’s enduring commitment to drawing as both a meditative act and a formal exploration — a creative force where gesture, thought, and material converge. At first glance, the interweaving labyrinth of red and green appears randomly placed. Yet, on closer inspection, these meandering paths reveal a refined and intentional gestural quality. For Marden, “[Drawing] is an intimate medium. It's very direct, it's very close. There's less between the artist and the art. There is real closeness, direct contact,” collapsing the distance between thought, hand, and line. Situated beyond the confines of traditional movements or genres, Marden’s looping lines uphold the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, particularly Jackson Pollock’s emphasis on process. “I sort of came back to Pollock,” Marden explained. “He doesn't apply the image; he lets the image evolve out of the activity. And for me, this is very important, and it's basically what I'm exploring in my own work.” Pollock’s famed merging of “drawing into painting” is especially relevant to Marden’s output of the 1990s. As Lisa G. Corrin observed in the Serpentine Gallery catalogue: “Although drawing has been at the centre of Marden’s work throughout the 1990s, it is no longer a threshold through which he must pass to paint. It is painting.” Never premeditated but guided by intention but not by blueprint, Marden’s webs of ink balance precision with spontaneity. In Marden’s work the act of drawing becomes a form of continual discovery — autonomous and evolving. Marden’s signature style took shape in the mid-1980s, when he began incorporating elements from the natural world into his work. Departing from his earlier monochromes and grids, he began drawing trees, shells, and rocks — sometimes all on the same sheet. “One day, I would draw a tree; the next day, we would go to the same place, and I would draw a sea shell on top of it, and then the next day, we would go somewhere else, and I would draw rocks, and I would layer it all on top on the same drawings,” he explained. “You are observing nature, and yet you are just trying to respond to it. You are not trying to draw a picture of it... It deals with a certain kind of abstraction.” Rather than rendering nature literally, Marden used its forms as reference points — manipulating and transforming them so each line becomes a direct, intuitive response to what he observed. “I think my idea of form comes from observation of nature. To me, that's true form, or the best reference. You just try to keep it as interesting as that. And so you make these corrections, and sometimes you choose to leave them,” he’s said. This attentiveness to the natural world’s rhythms and irregularities would soon find resonance in another major influence: calligraphy. In 1984, Marden encountered the expressive, winding forms of Japanese calligraphy at the Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8th–19th Century exhibition in New York, followed by a trip to Japan, China, and Hong Kong a decade later. Like Abstract Expressionism, Marden understood calligraphy as a full-bodied experience. “It's not a technique or an ideology; it's a form of pure expression,” the artist explained. “Each time a calligrapher makes a mark, it will be distinctive because he has a particular physicality. Great artists exploit this; their thinking and their physicality become one.” Marden’s fluency with calligraphy arguably most informed his technical approach, as well as the elegant poetry resulting from the composition of the line itself. This calligraphic approach to drawing became so central to Marden’s practice that he described his approach to painting in similar terms. Reflecting on his now-iconic Cold Mountain series, he said: “One of the things I wanted to do in the Cold Mountain paintings was to lose myself in the same way that I lose myself when I am drawing… [When] I started the paintings, there were so many things that startled me… It was automatic; it was gestural and automatic.” With calligraphic drawing and painting as his launching point, Marden’s 1990s output gave rise to a new vocabulary—marked by organic rhythm, atmospheric depth, and an openness to continual transformation.