Matthew Marks Gallery

This publication is the first to concentrate on Brice Marden’s paintings on marble, a unique group of works made between 1981 and 1987 on the Greek island of Hydra. It reveals for the first time the essential place these paintings hold in the development of the artist’s work. The thirty works that compose the series, all painted in oil and graphite on marble fragments, represent a key transition from Marden’s earlier minimal compositions to his later calligraphic ones. The first such work, painted on a remnant of marble the artist found on Hydra, incorporates the organic patterns of the broken stone — rough edges and meandering veins — and signals the introduction of diagonal lines to his mark-making vocabulary.