Starting in the 1930s in Taos, New Mexico, Agnes Martin began making paintings and drawings of geometric abstractions. While her palette shifted with her 1952 move to New York City, and again upon her return to painting in New Mexico in the early 1970s, she remained committed to the defined lines of a geometric grid.

Martin’s faint graphite lines are the trace of meditative marks that combine American Transcendental spirituality with Buddhist traditions. For Martin, painting was “a world without objects, without interruption… or obstacle. 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.”