New York · 15/09/2026
Brice Marden: I Am Plane Image
I Am Plane Image is a comprehensive survey of Brice Marden's paintings at Gagosian's West 21st Street gallery, organized in collaboration with the Estate of Brice Marden. It is the first exhibition of its kind in New York in twenty years. Spanning six decades, it combines major loans from institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art with important works from the Estate and from private collections, offering a rare chance to see paintings that have seldom, if ever, been exhibited. The exhibition centers on Marden's lifelong preoccupation with the plane and with the physical presence of the painted surface. "For me," he said, "the history of modern art is tightening the relationship of the image to the plane. . . . The whole history of twentieth-century art seems to be where you work up to the ultimate plane image. You try to keep the plane and the image locked together." His particular achievement was to synthesize a wide range of art-historical sources into paintings grounded in the natural world. He traveled widely, lived in several places, and preferred to work by natural light. From the mid-1960s Marden was immersed in New York's cultural life, gathering at Max's Kansas City with the pioneering artists, writers, and musicians of the day. Nebraska (1966), the earliest painting in the show, was prompted by the "surprising" landscape of the Midwest, which he encountered on a cross-country road trip; he kept the painting and hung it in his home for the rest of his life. In the years that followed, often spent on the Greek island of Hydra, he moved toward the brighter palette of Summer Table (1972–73). He also developed what would become a signature technique, mixing beeswax and turpentine into oil paint and applying it in multiple layers to intensify each color, plane, and brushstroke. Calligraphy became a central concern, and in the early 1980s Marden began working with it at scale in his first calligraphic paintings, among them Study for the Muses (Eagles Mere Version) (1991–94/1997–99). Made in his studio in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, which he described as his most "Zen-like" workspace, the painting takes its color from the surrounding woods. The six panels of The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second Version (2000–06) unfold in a chromatic progression that likewise meditates on landscape, here in the tradition of the Chinese garden. The exhibition closes with The Dance (2022–23) and Lingerie (2022–23), two large canvases painted in his studio in Tivoli, New York. Among the last works he completed, both appeared in his final Gagosian exhibition in 2023. Throughout his career Marden kept returning to a set of ideas about activating the surface of a painting—a fixation evident as early as his Yale MFA thesis, in which he wrote: "I have had to concentrate on the rectangle problems. I have been obsessed with the idea and have become fanatical about it." I Am Plane Image distills this deep engagement with the plane. The exhibition coincides with the publication of Brice Marden: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 1961–2023, edited by Tiffany Bell and distributed by Yale University Press. Begun in 2019 with the full support of the artist and his studio and completed in collaboration with the Estate, the book includes an introduction by Larry Gagosian, an essay by Bell, an illustrated chronology by Bell and Anna Gray, and two texts by Marden. It documents nearly five hundred paintings made between 1961 and 2023, including almost ninety previously unpublished works and more than seventy that have never been exhibited, with entry notes drawn largely from the artist's own words.
