Untitled #12

Early in her career, Agnes Martin identified with her contemporaries Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, sharing with them an interest in monochromatic color schemes, geometric forms, and spiritual or emotional content. In the 1960s Martin stopped making art and moved to rural New Mexico. When she resumed painting in 1974, her consistent vocabulary of grids and lines began to reflect her surround-ings. Untitled #12—part of a series of I5 square canvases painted in 1977—is a hand-drawn graphite grid on a muted gray ground that quietly invites a slow study of gradation and light.