The Hard Work of Removing the Mind: Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin spent decades making paintings that appear to contain almost nothing. Pale grids, soft horizontal bands, barely visible pencil lines on gessoed canvas. The discipline required to sustain that emptiness was extraordinary.

Martin was not a minimalist in the way the word is usually deployed. She was not interested in reduction for its own sake, or in the intellectual games of conceptual art. Her work was about feeling — specifically, about creating conditions in which the viewer might experience what she called "perfection" or "beauty" without the interference of the thinking mind.

Her paintings ask almost nothing of the viewer except time. They reward slowness. They punish reproduction — no photograph has ever captured what it feels like to stand in front of one.