Art Forum – Brice Marden, who drew from Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism in pathbreaking explorations of gesture, line, and color that put him in a category of one, died August 9 at his home in Tivoli, New York, after managing cancer for several years. He was eighty-four. Marden rose to fame in the early 1970s with his densely hued multipanel works, which he created just as painting had gone out of fashion, thus reviving the medium for a new generation. Subsequent decades saw him shift to using marble fragments as a substrate for both vibrantly colored and neutral-toned abstractions, inspired by his time on the Greek island of Hydra, where he lived part-time; in the 1980s, he began engaging with the calligraphic form, which he most notably explored in his widely lauded “Cold Mountain” works begun late in that decade. Critic Peter Schjeldahl in a 2006 issue of the New Yorker named Marden “the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades.” – read more
