Brice Marden

Brice Marden (born in 1938, New York, US) is a painter and printmaker who studied at Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts and at Yale University. In his early minimal paintings he reacted against the dominance of gestural techniques in second generation Abstract Expressionism by emphasising the subtlety of surface and colour within the spatial and structural limits of the rectangle. Bringing together the painterly quality of Abstract Expressionism with the intellectual rigours of Minimalism, Marden balanced an emotional intensity with formal simplicity.

Marden's paintings are often born from a particular experience, or in reaction to having spent time in a specific place. In 1971, he and his wife, Helen Harrington (now Marden), visited the Greek island of Hydra, to which they have returned every year since, and the light and landscape have greatly influenced his work. The series of paintings on marble were made between 1981 and 1987 in Hydra. The thirty works that compose the series, all painted in oil and graphite on marble fragments, represent a key transition from Marden's earlier minimal compositions to his later calligraphic ones. The remnants were found on the island of Hydra, and the works incorporate the organic patterns of the broken stone - rough edges and meandering veins - his work on the surface responding to the found painting of the marble.