With the first retrospective devoted to Agnes Martin (1912−2004) to take place after her death, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents an overview of the lifework of an extraordinary American artist. Approximately 140 paintings, drawings, and print works spanning six decades trace Martin's artistic evolution from the early paintings to the experimental works and assemblages produced in New York during the 1950s, and finally to the ripe late works.

This international touring exhibition, whose only station on the European continent is Düsseldorf, was organized by the Tate Modern in London in cooperation with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. "With this retrospective, we honor one of the most remarked painters of our time. Today, a reevaluation is imperative: Agnes Martin's role and her importance for 20th century art have yet to be adequately appreciated," explains Marion Ackermann, Director of the Kunstsammlung.

The regional gallery of the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia is among the few European museums to own a work by Agnes Martin. "In 1998, thanks to a fund-raising dinner and support from numerous artists and from our Society of Friends, we were able to acquire the painting Untitled #5. This representative work is now on display in the permanent collection in direct proximity to paintings by contemporary such as Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline," comments Ackermann. Even early on in her artistic career, Martin won the recognition of New York's male-dominated art scene. She made a sustained impression on the artists of her own generation, as well succeeding ones, and soon came to be regarded as an artist's artist – internationally as well."

In Düsseldorf, the inception of her development as a painter – initially characterized by realism – is marked by a rarely exhibited Self-Portrait (1947), previously in possession of the Martin family. A decade later, she moved to New York, where she was part of the legendary art scene there together with Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. In early works such as Mid-Winter, Harbor No.1, and Beach, she engages in a confrontation with both the realistic and abstract tendencies of modernism in America and Europe.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Martin's artistic vocabulary was based on horizontal and vertical lines that subdivided the canvas in grid fashion or in stripes. On her matt, almost exclusively square canvases and sheets of paper, an essential role is played by the interplay between the lines of the graphite pencil and the reduced palette of delicate gray and chromatic tones. "Here is an understated, a soft-spoken style of painting and drawing, one indebted to abstraction, which developed in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalist tendencies. On the basis of this distillation and reduction, Agnes Martin developed a pictorial universe of overwhelming richness, one capable of offering patient viewers enthralling visual experiences," comments the exhibition's curator Maria Müller-Schareck on the work of this American artist, who spent most of her life in the solitude of New Mexico.

“My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you do not encounter anything“. With these words, composed in 1966, Martin refers to her own works, whose singular, luminous effects are based on her use of extremely thinned acrylic paint on a white primed ground.

Many of her grid paintings were produced using pencil or colored pen and paint on canvas: in these works, among them Untitled #3 (1974) and Fiesta (1985), where Martin investigates novel compositional possibilities, the borderline between painting and drawing dissolves. As in many early works on paper, they are revealed as genuine "light traps," where both the light and the gaze of the beholder become enmeshed in the intricate network of the linear grid (Untitled/1963).

In her final years as well, the now elderly artist painted almost daily, reverting to the geometric forms and powerful colors of the period predating her strict application of the grid: produced in 2003, for example, were The Sea and the painting Homage to Life, dominated by a black trapezoidal form.

In all of her works, Agnes Martin sought to achieve an effect she described as follows: “I want to draw a certain response … Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature, an experience of simple joy“. (1966)