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Painter Brice Marden died final night time at his Tivoli dwelling in Duchess County, New York. The 84-year-old artist devoted his 60-year-long profession to abstraction, reviving the creative motion within the wake of the postwar Expressionists and pushing the model in new instructions. Marden’s daughter, Mirabelle, introduced her father’s passing on Instagram this morning, writing that he was portray in his studio simply final Saturday. The artist had been battling most cancers.
Marden emerged within the early Sixties with a physique of monochromatic work created with paint and encaustic (melted wax). He had just lately graduated with an MFA from Yale’s College of Artwork — the place he studied beneath Alex Katz and Jon Schueler — and had taken a job as a safety guard at New York’s Jewish Museum. Marden had his first solo present in 1966 at Bykert Gallery.
Artists akin to Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella have been deviating from the Summary Expressionism motion that had dominated the artwork world a decade prior, however Marden ignored his contemporaries’ forays into Conceptualism, Pop Artwork, and Minimalism. His meticulously measured early work comprise single-color rectangles organized to convey an virtually meditative high quality.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, Marden started incorporating curved strains into his canvases, which he now coloured with a combination of wax, paint, and turpentine brushed in skinny layers. Critic Carter Ratcliff famous in a 2019 Hyperallergic article that the artist’s work is usually formally excellent. Nonetheless, his work retains an emotive high quality, and it usually evoked his private experiences. In 1972, he traveled to Hydra, Greece — the primary of many journeys to the world. He painted his canvases with the colours of the Mediterranean in a well-liked collection titled Hydra (1972), which he continued in subsequent a long time. Marden would usually work and rework a portray for years.
Additionally within the ’80s, Marden turned serious about Chinese language calligraphy, creating the acclaimed Chilly Mountain collection. He titled the works after the English title of Ninth-century Chinese language poet Han Shan, whose poems about humankind’s relationship with nature have been translated within the Fifties and subsequently embraced by US countercultures.
Marden painted all through his lengthy profession, always including new stylistic languages to his work. In 2021, he mounted a solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery. In a Hyperallergic overview titled “A Shifting Meditation on Mortality in Brice Marden’s Late Work,” John Yau simplifies Marden’s profession into what he sees as three phases: 1964 to the mid-Nineteen Eighties, a protracted center interval, and a last stage that began in 2016/2017.
“The Tao teaches the adept to let go of expectations and stay within the right here and now,” Yau writes, describing works the place Marden’s ink ran low as he approached the sting of the canvas. “He doesn’t replenish the ink however information himself fading from view. The indicators he makes won’t be decipherable, however they spoke straight to my coronary heart. They’re the diary of an ageing man dwelling in time, whereas conveying his love for sure locations and sights. I feel they’re among the many most open, deeply transferring work and drawings that Marden has made in his already storied profession.”
Marden was born in 1938 within the Westchester city of Bronxville, New York. He attended Florida Southern College and Boston College earlier than incomes his MFA. Marden married Pauline Baez (people singer Joan Baez’s sister), with whom he had a son, Nicholas. After their divorce, he married Helen Harrington. Marden is survived by his spouse, Harrington, their two daughters, Mirabelle and Melia, his son Nicholas, his two grandchildren, and his youthful sister, Mary Carroll Marden.
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