Agnes Martin’s sublime abstractions light up Gangneung in her first solo exhibition in Korea
American artist in dialogue with ‘dansaekhwa’ master Chung Sang-hwa
Like many abstract paintings, American icon Agnes Martin’s (1912-2004) canvas works — populated by meticulously penciled grids and horizontal bands of translucent, pale colors — may not immediately pull in crowds of viewers when presented in isolation.
After all, in today’s world oversaturated with visual stimuli, it takes conscious effort to gaze upon such a largely empty surface and resist becoming bored of its apparent monotony.
When these paintings are displayed in company with each other, however, something magical happens. The serene allure of their hazily colored surfaces suddenly becomes palpable and begins to reverberate throughout the entire space. It becomes almost a spiritual experience to get lost in Martin’s forest of sublime abstractions.
“My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything — no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form,” the artist once remarked. “You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean … It is to accept the necessity of … going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.”
Bearing this in mind, no other venue could be a more fitting backdrop for Martin’s first-ever solo exhibition in Korea than the new Sorol Art Museum in the eastern coastal city of Gangneung, Gangwon Province. Designed by the New York-based firm Meier Partners, the building encapsulates all the signature vocabulary of its Pritzker Prize-winning founder, Richard Meier, from the blindingly all-white, minimalist architecture to the gleaming glass-fronted facade.
The show, titled “Moments of Perfection,” reveals itself to visitors as they step into the second-floor gallery after traversing hallways flooded with sunlight streaming through vast expanses of windows.
“[Being invited to] introduce her work here for the first time to the general public was a really interesting proposition,” recalled Frances Morris, the director emerita of the Tate Modern who co-curated the Agnes Martin retrospective at the London museum in 2015.
“The idea behind this project was not to do a survey show, because Martin had an incredibly long career and made many hundreds of paintings, but rather to identify and show the essence of her practice by focusing on key moments. Hence the show’s title.”
The exhibition’s chronological journey begins in the mid-1950s New York, exploring what Morris describes as the “origins” of Martin’s works in informal abstraction, characterized by biomorphic, geometric shapes, before she settled on her iconic grid.
The first section culminates with one of the artist’s best-known grid paintings, “The Tree” (1964).
“When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and then this grid came into my mind, and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do. So I painted it, and then I was satisfied,” the artist later recalled.
For her, the grid, which privileged no particular space over another, exemplified the ideal virtue of “egolessness.”
Although Martin’s pursuit of visual simplicity and repetition has often been associated with Minimalism, she herself shied away from such a label. Rather, her practice was tethered to spiritual meditation and intuition, drawing from a mix of Zen Buddhist and Taoist ideas.
In 1967, she abruptly set down her brush and left New York to travel alone across the country. It wasn’t until seven
My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything — no forms.
years later that she, now retreated to the relative solitude of New Mexico, stood in front of the canvas again.
Her series of post-1974 paintings — marking the artist’s most representative creative era — form the highlight of the show.
Eight gray monochrome canvases, produced between 1977 and 1992, evoke “the myriad formal, tonal and textual variations Martin achieved within her self-imposed restrictions,” according to the museum. In contrast, eight luminously translucent color paintings created in the final decade of her life exude a more uplifting and liberating air.
Overall, the charm of her art lies in the mesmerizing harmony created between diluted colors and faint pencil lines — elements that are indeed difficult to convey fully in photographs. It’s all the more reason to plan a trip to the museum for an intimate, in-person viewing experience.
And the museum certainly has more to offer. In conversation with Martin’s meditative abstractions on-site are the white monochrome paintings of Korea’s “dansaekhwa” master Chung Sang-hwa.
Presented in the first-floor gallery, “In Dialog: Chung Sang-hwa” features 13 works produced since the 1970s, all showcasing his signature technique.
The nonagenarian artist’s practice begins by coating the canvas with a mixture of kaolin clay and water. Once the thick liquid dries, he draws grid patterns on the back of the fabric and starts folding the whole canvas along these horizontal, vertical and diagonal axes. As cracks appear on the surface, the dried clay is peeled off, and the spaces are filled in with layers of acrylic paint.
This labor-intensive process of “ripping off” and “filling in” is repeated until he achieves what he believes to be perfect harmony, with nothing more to add or take away.
“Following a studio visit to Chung, I was fascinated to find many points of connection to his and Martin’s processes of work, in particular, the relationship between hard work and very rigorous planning combined with intuition and gesture. In art history, normally, you see these things as incompatible, but both artists brought them together in interesting ways,” Morris noted.
“Moments of Perfection” and “In Dialog: Chung Sang-hwa” run through Aug. 25 at the Sorol Art Museum.
Upon the conclusion of these two exhibitions, museum management will transition from the current Korean Research Institute of Contemporary Art (KoRICA) to the municipality of Gangneung, as part of the agreed-upon gratuitous transfer of property, which includes the museum’s building constructed on government-owned land, to the state.
However, uncertainties loom over the Sorol Art Museum’s future. Its incumbent director Kim Suk-mo revealed that the city government has yet to allocate any budget for the institution’s future operations or exhibition programming, nor has it appointed his successor. Such circumstances leave the museum’s envisioned role as Gangneung’s new cultural landmark heavily in question.