Brice Marden: These paintings are of themselves

This book was published on the occasion of Brice Marden: These paintings are of themselves, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the artist at Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, New York. The catalogue includes full-color illustrations of each work, as well as details of works and installation views documenting the exhibition. Portraits of the artist in his studio were taken by the artist’s daughter, Mirabelle Marden, and are accompanied by images of works in progress.

Marden’s paintings evoke the daily and seasonal shifts in natural light and color that the artist observes when working in his studio in Tivoli in upstate New York. He begins with drawing, filling some canvases with gestural glyphs that occupy a realm between writing and painting. Over these, he applies sinuous, multihued networks of linear brushstrokes, establishing interrelationships between the compositions’ straight and curving lines, and between their contours—whether defined or implied—and perimeters.

Related works on paper made on the Caribbean island of Nevis reveal the immediacy and range of Marden’s drawing practice and exemplify the artist’s sustained engagement with the traditions of Chinese poetry and calligraphy, which he initiated in the 1980s and has developed continuously ever since. A new text by Eliot Weinberger takes this particular interest as its point of departure, connecting Marden’s work to the origin of Chinese writing and early modernist philosophies about the content of abstract art.