Artwork Description
Untitled
Dimensions: 13.75 x 13.75″
Year: 1990
Media: lithograph
“Martin had, from the start, an extraordinary sensitivity to subtleties of light and touch. When she hit, at last, on the format of the grid—a motif that was tacit in modern painting after Cubism but never before stripped, and kept, so bare—she found ways to make those qualities the exclusive basis of a wholly original, full-bodied art. She insisted that the results did not exclude nature but analogized it. She said, “It’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in landscape.” (Apropos of the slightly varied forms in some series of her paintings, she recalled studying clouds in the sky: “I paid close attention for a month to see if they ever repeated. They don’t repeat.”) The effect of Martin’s art is not an exercise in overarching style but a mode of moment-to-moment being.”
– Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times