Tropezienne (Thinking Blue)

Within the radically reductive tendencies of American minimal art, Brice Marden’s, with the monochrome gray pictures he produced since the early 1960s, occupies a very distinct position of his own. In contrast to the classic minimalists Frank Stella and Donald Judd, who tried to establish a form of abstraction that in its formal purity was completely detached from everything individually human, Marden’s art is permeated with references to the personal and existential. Even in his first pictures Marden committed himself to the ambivalent color gray, which, with its tonal nuances and atmospherics, subsequently became a key feature of his work. He mixed his oil paint with hot wax, first applying this to the canvas with wide brushes and then reworking it with a palette knife and pointed blade. In a lengthy work process, Marden laid down a number of layers over each other. Only at the bottom edge—as with "Tropezienne (Thinking Blue)"—does he leave a small, ragged stripe free. This is the point where the complex working process, with its numerous blurrings and overlappings, is revealed. In contrast, on the picture surface itself there is a lively but unconnected conversation between forms with completely disparate markings: slight unevenness in color application, fine scratches and indentations, fingerprints—traces of the work process that make it possible to experience the color mix in its haptic materiality. The surface structure evokes the organic density of human skin. With this notion of the pictorial related to the body, Marden’s art stands in conscious opposition to the atmospheric, dematerialized color spaces of the abstract formalists.