Rodeo

During the past four decades, Brice Marden has played a key role in maintaining the vitality of abstract painting. Rodeo, a work of imposing scale and stark presence, represents a high point of his early career. Two rectangular canvas panels—one yellow, the other gray—are joined to form an eight-foot square. Each canvas is pulled across a deep (two and one-eighth-inch) stretcher and painted with a combination of oil and beeswax. The stretchers and thick, opaque pigment give Rodeo a sense of weight and a sculptural presence. Like all of Marden’s paintings, Rodeo is insistently handmade. The artist laid multiple layers of the medium over his canvas panels, adding an extraordinary sense of tactility to this relatively simple composition. The line joining the two panels may suggest a horizon line, and thus a landscape. The juxtaposition of two rectangular fields also recalls the work of Mark Rothko. In contrast to Rothko’s luminous, floating fields of color, Marden’s twin panels seem determinedly earthbound, presented as physical facts rather than as expressions of spiritual aspiration.