Morocco

I paint nature.
—Brice Marden

Gagosian is pleased to present Morocco, an exhibition by Brice Marden, traveling from the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech, Morocco.
Nearly forty years ago, Marden visited Morocco for the first time, setting into motion a new line of artistic inquiry inspired by the intricate architecture and late afternoon light of the “Rose City.” This exhibition includes more than sixty works on paper, forty-eight of which were once contained in a workbook that accompanied the artist over the past decade. In the majority of the works, a square or rectangle is set within the white of the page, with winding lines and loose blots rendered in colored ink or gouache forming tangled grids of varying densities. Infinitely fluid, Marden’s gestures in yellow, red, and blue oscillate between foreground and background, light and darkness.

The cornerstone of the exhibition is Helen’s Moroccan Painting (), a large-scale canvas titled for Marden’s wife, also a painter. The canvas is divide horizontally into two rectangles—green on top (evoking Morocco’s valleys) and burnt sienna below (recalling the red earth)—both applied in thick oil paint with beeswax and inspired by Marden’s memory of the landscape during a drive from Ouarzazate in . An untitled work from swaps these colors, so that a narrower band of green appears at the bottom of the composition and the rest is deep red. What sets the two works apart most, however, is the vibrating veil of multicolored lines that seems to float at the surface of the picture plane in the latter painting.

Brice Marden was born in in Bronxville, New York, and currently lives and works in New York.

Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts
Houston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Saint Louis Art Museum; Tate, London; Kunstmuseum Basel; Museum Wiesbaden, Germany; Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa; and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Exhibitions include Cold Mountain, Dia Center for the Arts, New York (, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Menil Collection, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Städtisches Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany); Work of the 990s; Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, Dallas Museum of Art (, traveled to Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Miami Art Museum; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh); A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, Museum of Modern
Art, New York (, traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Hamburger Banhof, Berlin); Works on Paper, Kunstmuseum Basel (); Jawlensky-Preisträger: Retrospektive der Druckgraphik, Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (); and Morocco, Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech, Morocco ().