Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"Paintings are physical. So is the act of creating them. This physicality should be emphasized. If you're not working with preconceived forms and thinking, then you can concentrate on expression. It is possible, I think, to make art on this instinctive level, out of a deeply felt response. The longer I paint, the more I think this is true." Brice Marden, excerpted from Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retropective, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Brice Marden was born in Bronxville, New York in 1938. He studied art at Boston University and Yale University in the late 50s and early 60s, developing a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, unique palette.
Marden moved to New York after graduation, he worked as a guard at the Jewish Museum and came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, furthering his interest in gridded compositions. He made his first monochromatic single-panel painting in 1964, the year of his first solo exhibition and a stay in Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Alberto Giacometti. The next few years saw his first solo show in New York, his employment as Robert Rauschenberg's assistant and multiple semesters as a painting instructor at SVA.
Throughout the 1970s, Marden's work was showcased at Documenta, in a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and in various exhibitions that traveled throughout the United States. Trips to Rome and Pompeii strengthened his interest in Greek and Roman art and architecture.
In the mid-1980s, Marden turned away from Minimalism toward gestural abstraction, traveling to Thailand to learn about calligraphy and the art of the brush stroke. He continued to exhibit regularly in New York throughout the 1990s and was the subject of two major traveling shows. Marden currently lives in New York City and Hydra, Greece.
Published by Glenstone Museum. Edited with interview by Emily Wei Rales, Ali Nemerov. Introduction by Emily Wei Rales. Text by Suzanne Hudson.
Throughout his career, American artist Brice Marden (born 1938) has explored various modes of painterly abstraction, producing monochrome canvases in nuanced, muted hues as well as calligraphic compositions on a grand scale. This book marks the long-term exhibition of Moss Sutra with the Seasons (2010–15) at Glenstone Museum, a monumental five-panel painting commissioned by Glenstone and inspired by the artist's fascination with moss, the changing seasons and traditional Chinese calligraphy, among other subjects. The catalog includes two original essays by art historian Suzanne Hudson, an interview with the artist about this commission and a photo-essay by the artist's daughter, Mirabelle Marden, who documented the process of creating the work. Also included are reproductions of all additional works by the artist in Glenstone's collection, a group which spans each decade of the artist's career and an introduction by Emily Wei Rales, Founder and Director of Glenstone Museum.
Published by Matthew Marks Gallery. Interview by Matt Connors.
Brice Marden (born 1938) first incorporated gesture in his paintings and drawings in the mid-1980s. Inspired by Chinese calligraphy, the wandering lines were a departure from the planes of color that had characterized his prior work. In recent years the monochrome has returned, but in a different form, subtly altered by the artist’s ongoing engagement with gesture. This catalogue presents Marden’s first new body of work since 2012. It includes 12 paintings— calligraphic and monochrome, with multiple panels and single panels—and 43 drawings, all illustrated in full color. Photographs of his studios in Tivoli and Nevis offer a view of his tools and techniques, while a conversation with painter Matt Connors sheds light on Marden’s continuing evolution and influence.
PUBLISHER Matthew Marks Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9 x 11.25 in. / 96 pgs / 66 color / 1 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 4/26/2016 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2016 p. 133
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781880146941TRADE List Price: $40.00 CAD $54.00 GBP £35.00
Mars black, lemon yellow, use muddy white. Don't forget the young blonde in La Dolce Vita. Scenes in country cafe and post orgy on the beach. She is the one Benno calls the 'Purity symbol.' Orange green grey. This and other reflections make up Brice Marden: Notebook Sept. 1964-Sept. 1967 and Brice Marden: Notebook Feb. 1968-, facsimiles of American artist Brice Marden's (born 1938) personal journals. On every page, a patchwork of clippings, drawings, renderings and handwritten notes reveal the painter's thought process and document the political and cultural events of the era. A prolific notetaker, Marden filled his journals with subject matter as familiar as references to Italian film director Federico Fellini and as esoteric as "looking at an object in nature and running lines around it." The constant throughout is the work--deliberate, studied rectangles of graphite and ballpoint pen allude to the monochrome paintings that earned the artist fame and are a precursor to the panel paintings to come. Each journal is a unique guide to Marden's artistic output from that period as well as a distinct reference to the city--at that time bustling with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns--where he painted.
PUBLISHER Karma, New York
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 4.25 x 7.25 in. / 128 pgs / 150 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/28/2015 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 134
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781938560484TRADE List Price: $25.00 CAD $30.00
Mars black, lemon yellow, use muddy white. Don't forget the young blonde in La Dolce Vita. Scenes in country cafe and post orgy on the beach. She is the one Benno calls the 'Purity symbol.' Orange green grey. This and other reflections make up Brice Marden: Notebook Sept. 1964-Sept. 1967 and Brice Marden: Notebook Feb. 1968-, facsimiles of American artist Brice Marden's (born 1938) personal journals. On every page, a patchwork of clippings, drawings, renderings and handwritten notes reveal the painter's thought process and document the political and cultural events of the era. A prolific notetaker, Marden filled his journals with subject matter as familiar as references to Italian film director Federico Fellini and as esoteric as "looking at an object in nature and running lines around it." The constant throughout is the work--deliberate, studied rectangles of graphite and ballpoint pen allude to the monochrome paintings that earned the artist fame and are a precursor to the panel paintings to come. Each journal is a unique guide to Marden's artistic output from that period as well as a distinct reference to the city--at that time bustling with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns--where he painted.
PUBLISHER Karma, New York
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 4.25 x 7.25 in. / 88 pgs / 150 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/28/2015 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 134
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781942607007TRADE List Price: $25.00 CAD $30.00
Published by Matthew Marks Gallery. Text by David Anfam.
Brice Marden: Ru Ware, Marbles, Polke features the most recent paintings from this towering figure in contemporary abstraction. The book’s title alludes to the breadth of Marden’s inspirations: rare Chinese pottery, coarse Greek marble and the late German artist Sigmar Polke. Each of the works or series in this volume stems from these sources: the Ru Ware Project (2007–2012), composed of nine small panels painted in pale blues and greens; 15 new paintings in oil on marble, which Marden completed on the Greek island of Hydra in 2012; and a large oil-on-linen painting, "Polke Letter" (2010–2011), a painterly homage to Marden’s contemporary. Helping to pinpoint Marden’s place in the flow of time is an essay by David Anfam, along with a statement written by the artist, an extended meditation on geometry, proportion and color.
Published by Matthew Marks Gallery. Text by Paul Galvez, Eileen Costello. Interview by Ed Howard.
Graphite Drawings includes 25 of Brice Marden’s seminal early works on paper and accompanies the first exhibition devoted solely to this body of work. The drawings, made between 1962 and 1981, feature luxurious surfaces of graphite and beeswax worked into dense, reflective planes of blacks, whites and grays. Within these surfaces, Marden reveals the underlying geometries of the rectangle and the grid, a formal strategy that has characterized his work from the 1960s to the present. Art historian Richard Schiff has written of these works, "Marden’s black reveals its qualities only to those who look and can see its changes … Each area of blackness has its history, its experiential specificity." Accompanying the illustrations are an essay by Paul Galvez, a 1976 interview with the artist by Ed Howard (published here for the first time) and extensive documentation on each work featured in the exhibition.
Published by Matthew Marks Gallery. Text by Jeffrey Weiss.
The paintings and drawings that compose Brice Marden's Letter series, the artist's first extended group of works since his 2006 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, demonstrate the persistence of labor and method that has characterized the artist's practice for over four decades now. The Letter paintings have in common a strict formatting device: borders or bands of color along the left and right vertical edges of the canvas.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Essays by Gary Garrels, Richard Shiff, Brenda Richardson, Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro and Michael Duffy.
In the autumn of 2006, The Museum of Modern Art will present Brice Marden: A Retrospective, the artist's first major American retrospective. The exhibition, which will travel to San Francisco and Berlin, will constitute an unprecedented gathering of Marden's work, with more than 50 paintings and an equal number of drawings, balanced across the artist's career. The accompanying catalogue is the first book to take readers through the full course of Marden's work as it has developed over more than 40 years from the early 1960s to the present, showing his gradual, deliberate evolution, along with his constant exploration of light, color and surface at every turn. Marden's first 20 years of work, characterized by the luminous monochrome panels for which he won his first acclaim, will for the first time appear alongside the celebrated production of the past 20 years, which followed a shift in the mid-1980s to calligraphic gestures in shimmering grounds, and another shift in the past decade to heightened color. Two of Marden's newest paintings appear here for the first time. Gary Garrels interprets Marden's work and places it in historical context. Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at Harvard, examines issues of materials, processes and conservation. Richard Shiff, Brenda Richardson and Michael Duffy explore Marden's early use of a grid and his engagement with time and space in the studio, as well as his observation of the elemental qualities of nature, his representational links to nature, and the distinctive emotional effects of the abstract monochrome works for which he was initially recognized. Marden himself addresses his working methods in an interview, and a comprehensive chronology, exhibition history and bibliography close the book out.
Brice Marden
Brice Marden: Notebook Sept. 1964-Sept. 1967
Brice Marden: Notebook Feb. 1968-
Brice Marden: Ru Ware, Marbles, Polke
Brice Marden: Graphite Drawings
Brice Marden: Letters
Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective