Brice Marden

Brice Marden – Single colour variations characterised his early work

Brice Marden was born on 15 October 1938 in Bronxville, New York. He spent his childhood at nearby Briarcliff Manor and from 1956 to 1958 studied in Lakeland at Florida Southern College. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Boston University School of Fine And Applied Arts in 1961, followed by a Masters from Yale School of Art in 1963, where his teachers included Reginald Pollack, Esteban Vicente, Jon Schueler, Philipp Pearlstein, Jack Tworkov, Alex Katz and Gabor Peterdi. During his art studies, Brice Marden also made the acquaintance of later great artist personalities such as Richard Serra, Sylvia and Robert Mangold, Janet Fish, Gary Hudson, Chuck Close and Vilja Celmins. In 1963, Marden moved to New York, and during a post as security guard at the Jewish Museum, he discovered the art of Jasper Johns, which he was inspired to explore in depth. His first monochrome picture was created in the winter of 1964, which, like his following early works, consisted of only a single panel. 

Inspiration from Greek landscape and Asian culture

During a summer trip to Paris, Brice Marden discovered the work of Édouard Manet, Francisco de Zubarán and Diego Velázquez, which had a lasting impression on his own creativity. He also studied the work of Jean Fautrier and Alberto Giacometti and began working with print himself. The artist understood his drawings as independent ‘spaces’ in which the spirit of a concrete place was reflected. In 1966, Marden acquired a position as assistant to Robert Rauschenberg via Dorothea Rockburne. In the 1960s and 1970s, when painting was said in many places to be dead, Marden achieved worldwide fame with his monochrome variations. From 1971, he regularly visited the Greek island of Hydra where he was inspired by its landscape and light qualities, and it was there that he created a total of 31 oil paintings on marble fragments. Further travels led Marden to Rome and Pompeii, to Thailand, India and Sri Lanka. The Asian traditions held a great fascination for the artist, and many elements from the cultural circle flowed into his later work, such as the large-format calligraphic works created in the 1980s.

Great international exhibition and selling success

Brice Marden saw himself as a romantic artist, even when he responded to the preceding emotionality of Expressionism with consistent reduction, restrained colours and monochrome panels entirely in the style of Minimal Art. His work is also about sensory impressions and experiences. Brice Marden has participated in various important group exhibitions, including Documenta 5 in Kassel. The major retrospective, which was shown also in Berlin 2007, was declared ‘Exhibition of the Year 2007’ by German art critics. He has received prizes and awards for his art, including the Alexej-von-Jawlensky Prize of the City of Wiesbaden in 2004. Many of his pictures have sold for sometimes in the high millions: in 2013, the work Complements sold at an auction at Christie’s for more than 30 million dollars.