Untitled # 9

Agnes Martin American, born Canada

1984

Not on view

Martin spent her forty-year career exploring the production and perception of stillness. "My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent," she once explained, "and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in artwork, which is also wordless and silent." She developed a consistent format—an allover grid on a square canvas—and experimented with subtle variations of line and tone, creating an aesthetic vocabulary that was spare and coherent. In Untitled #9, minimal in effect, Martin removed the visual distractions of conventional space through quiet, meditative gestures. Three equidistant horizontal lines mark the canvas, but the rigid geometry is balanced by the hand-drawn lines, which tremble and stutter across the painting’s surface.

Artwork Details

Title: Untitled # 9
Artist: Agnes Martin (American (born Canada), Macklin, Saskatchewan 1912–2004 Taos, New Mexico)
Date: 1984
Medium: Acrylic, India ink, and graphite on canvas
Dimensions: 72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Gift of Milly and Arne Glimcher, 1984
Object Number: 1984.435
Rights and Reproduction: © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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