TATE COLLECTION


TATE COLLECTION

Acquisitions

ARTIST ROOMS: The d'Offay Donation

Agnes Martin (1912–2004)

One room featuring three 1990s paintings: Untitled #5, 1994; Happy Holiday, 1999; and Faraway Love,1999.

Agnes Martin’s career as one of America’s foremost abstract painters spans nearly five decades. Her earliest works from the 1960s are characterised by large, grid-based compositions. Later Martin reduced the scale of her square canvases and shifted her work to use bands of ethereal colour. These works move between a preoccupation with ordered geometry and the irregularity created by hand-drawn pencil lines. She viewed this deliberate inconsistency which undermines the possibility of geometric perfection, as analogous to the human condition. The three paintings from Martin’s later career held in The d’Offay Donation exemplify her exquisite handling of paint. The delicate colours appear to project beyond the picture plane to engage all the senses. Happy Holiday and Faraway Love come from a sequence of paintings from the late 1990s in which the artist used titles to evoke states of euphoria, contentment and memories of past happiness.

Happy Holiday Happy Holiday 1999
Acrylic and graphite on canvas
1524 x 1524 mm
Photo courtesy Anthony d'Offay Ltd
© Estate of Agnes Martin / ARS, NY and DACS, 2008

Artists

National Heritage Memorial Fund       The Art Fund       Department for Culture, Media and Sport      The Scottish Government

 

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