Harry Benson

Brice Marden

1991

Signed by the photographer.

Clyfford Still, LIFE Magazine, 1959

Brice Marden's Studio Offset lithograph poster (hand signed by Brice Marden in 2015) This print was published on the occasion of Brice Marden's 1996 exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, New York City. The image is based on Nan Goldin's 1995 photograph of Marden working in his studio. The print was signed by Brice Marden for the present owner. A collectors item when hand signed! Accompanied by Certificate of Guarantee issued by the present gallery About Brice Marden: Ultimately I’m using the painting as a sounding board for the spirit. . . . You can be painting and go into a place where thought stops—where you can just be and it just comes out. . . . I present it as an open situation rather than a closed situation. —Brice Marden Brice Marden (1938–2023) continuously refined and extended the traditions of lyrical abstraction. Experimenting with self-imposed rules, limits, and processes, and drawing inspiration from his extensive travels, Marden brought together the diagrammatic formulations of Minimalism, the immediacy of Abstract Expressionism, and the intuitive gesture of calligraphy in his exploration of gesture, line, and color. Born in Bronxville, New York, Marden received an MFA from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, where his teachers included the painters Alex Katz and Jon Schueler. After graduation he worked as a guard at the Jewish Museum in New York. There, during a 1964 Jasper Johns retrospective, Marden studied Johns’s early works extensively and considered them in relation to the Baroque masters he has long admired, such as Francisco de Zurbarán, Francisco Goya, and Diego Velázquez. Marden’s paintings from the 1960s include subtle, shimmering monochromes in gray tones, sometimes assembled into multipanel works, in a manner similar to the black paintings and White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, who hired Marden as a studio assistant in 1966. A trip to Greece in the early 1970s led Marden to create the Hydra paintings (1972), which capture the turquoise hues of the Mediterranean, and Thira (1979–80), a painting composed of eighteen interconnected panels inspired by the shadows and geometry of ancient temples. To heighten the effect of each color, plane, and brushstroke, Marden developed the unique process of adding beeswax and turpentine to oil paint and applying the mixture in many thin layers. Marden employed this technique for the Grove Group paintings (1972–76)—exhibited at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery in New York in 1991, along with related works—and the Red Yellow Blue paintings...

Brice Marden Nevis Letter 2009 Etching 30 x 22 1/2 inches; 76 x 57 cm Edition of 45 Signed, dated, and numbered in graphite (lower recto) Frame available upon request Available from Matthew Marks...