The exhibition Brice Marden: Works on Paper presents the American artist’s drawings from the last twenty years of his career. The selection, curated by the artist’s daughters Mirabelle and Melia Marden, highlights the central role of drawing as an autonomous practice, not merely subordinate to painting. The exhibition reveals Marden’s sustained commitment to abstraction through line, gesture, and mark-making, recalling his early Paris works of the 1960s, including the well-known charcoal rubbings taken directly from urban walls. Brice Marden, born in Bronxville in 1938 and deceased in 2023 in Tivoli, was one of the central figures of postwar American abstract painting. After studying in Boston and at Yale, he worked as an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg and became actively involved in the New York art scene. His early works, characterized by monochromatic fields rendered in oil and wax, evolved in the 1980s and 1990s into the Cold Mountain series, where calligraphic lines traverse broad, meditative surfaces in dialogue with Eastern philosophy and aesthetics. For Marden, drawing was both a preparatory tool and an expressive language. His works on paper incorporate urban and natural visual impressions, filtered through a sensitivity to hesitant and reflective gesture. The exhibition includes large-format sheets in mixed media, where light and the transparency of the paper interact with color and linear structures. In these works, the line is not decorative but essential - a trace of the artist’s presence and perceptual experience. The exhibition is accompanied by photographs of Marden in his studio and a catalogue featuring a critical essay by Eileen Costello, emphasizing the value of drawing as an aesthetic and spiritual laboratory. Works on Paper offers a deep and rigorous portrait of an artist who made gesture and line the core of an introspective practice, contributing significantly to the language of abstraction.
