Brice Marden (1938–2023) was an American artist heralded for breathing new life into painting through his fusion of minimalism with Abstract Expressionism. He was born in Bronxville, New York, and later attended Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts, from which he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1961. He went on to earn a master of fine arts degree from the Yale University School of Fine Art in 1963. Marden then moved to New York City and became a guard at the Jewish Museum, where a Jasper Johns retrospective inspired him to experiment with the surfaces and textures of the vertical panels of grays shading into blue and green that he was making at the time. His first solo exhibition in New York, at the Bykert Gallery in 1966, received significant critical and popular attention, and by 1975 he was enjoying his first museum show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Marden’s color palette broadened during the 1970s, and post-and-lintel construction became a frequent theme. In the 1980s, he began to create gestural paintings that “seemed to wed Asian influences with the linear work of artists like Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock.” Marden was prolific over the next 40 years of his career, constantly adding new stylistic languages to work that won him, in the words of critic Roberta Smith, “a kind of flame-keeper status—something like the Giorgio Morandi of radical abstraction, a maker of inordinately beautiful, exquisitely made…artworks.”

Marden’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, among others.

At GRAY, his work has appeared in Selections from the Collection of Buck A. Mickel, 2011 and Reframing Minimalism, 2020.