“Agnes Martin: Moments of Perfection” Installation view ©Sorol Art MuseumSorol Art Museum presents “Agnes Martin: Moments of Perfection” on view through August 25.
“Agnes Martin: Moments of Perfection” is the first exhibition in Korea of a North American artist whose pursuit of pure abstraction was informed by Zen Buddhism and Taoism that she engaged with from her student years. Her abstract works coincide with the development of monochrome painting – Dansaekhwa – in Korea, and audiences will, for the first time, be able to focus on Martin’s work from an Eastern perspective.
This exhibition begins its exploration of Martin’s career in 1955 when she began to shed obvious figurative references from her compositions. Her painting moved from a vocabulary of organic and biomorphic shapes to a more formal and geometric language, often featuring circles, triangles, and rectangles. The extensive series of grey-monochrome canvases Martin painted between 1977 and 1992 are amongst the most enigmatic and beautiful of Martin’s work and a careful selection of eight contrasting canvases will represent, and evoke, the myriad formal, tonal and textual variations Martin achieved within her self-imposed restrictions. The exhibition concludes with eight paintings from the ‘Innocent Love’ series that Agnes Martin immersed herself in during the last decade of her life.
