Remembering Brice Marden (1938-2023)

August 10, 2023

Ultimately I’m using the painting as a sounding board for the spirit. . . . You can be painting and go into a place where thought stops—where you can just be and it just comes out. . . . I present it as an open situation rather than a closed situation. —Brice Marden

The great painter Brice Marden left this world August 9, 2023. We heard he had been painting up until Saturday at his studio in Tivoli, NY. Born in 1938, Marden was passionately dedicated to painting. He was perhaps the most prominent painter who carried the spiritual force of American abstract painting. Our ‘T’ Space exhibition Cold Mountain Studies, June 9 – August 11, 2019, featured 35 drawings that were key creative experiments leading towards his widely acclaimed Cold Mountain paintings in the late 1980s. 

Marden credited the ninth century Chinese monk Hanshan (‘Cold Mountain’) and translator Bill Porter with inspiring his creative break from monochrome to calligraphic painting. Porter, pen name Red Pine, read his definitive translations of Hanshan’s poetry at the opening, a synthesis of poetry and painting. 

In the spiritual presence of his deeply inspiring paintings he has an afterlife.

—Steven Holl
8/10/2023