"I want to draw a certain response," Agnes Martin stated in an interview in 1966. "Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature--an experience of simple joy...the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean."The fourth in Dia’s ongoing installment focuses on her practice during the 1980s.

Artist Biography

Agnes Martin was born in Macklin, a town in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912. She grew up in Vancouver, then moved to Bellingham, Washington, in 1932. Martin gained a bachelor of science degree in 1942 and a master of arts degree in 1952 from Teachers College at Columbia University, while living intermittently in New Mexico. In 1957 she relocated to Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan. She had her first one-person exhibition in 1958 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York. Surveys of her work have been presented at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1973), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1991), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992). From the late sixties until her death on December 16, 2004, Martin lived and worked in rural New Mexico.