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Transkript Agnes Martin
CD: Back to Art unquoted. Esenija, what’s our quote for today?
EB: Agnes Martin. The painter who said: “I paint with my back to the world.”
CD: Ah, great! A quote with lots of room for interpretation.
EB: A quote from a super famous and extremely elaborate painter. What’s your first thought?
CD: I think that statement is often misunderstood. People think she’s rejecting the world. But it’s more subtle than that.
EB: Go on…
CD: She’s not rejecting the world. She’s turning away from representing it. She’s not painting landscapes or objects or anything external. She’s painting her inner state.
EB: Her emotional landscape.
CD: Yes. And the way she expresses it is through very subtle colors, lines, fields, grids. Hand-drawn lines. Repetitive. Imperfect. The grid becomes a container for emotion in a way. Her paintings have a very distinctive style.
EB: I saw her retrospective at LACMA in 2016. And I was struck by something I couldn’t quite put into words. Standing in front of those paintings, I felt something that was both familiar and completely foreign. Like she was showing me a part of the world that I didn’t know existed but still recognized.
CD: That foreignness, that “otherness”, is part of what makes her work so unique, I think. It’s not just about turning inward. It’s about what she finds there.
EB: What do you hint at? That Martin had a mental sickness she struggled with?
CD: Yes. And I think that’s important to know, not because we need to psychoanalyze her work, or idealise or judge her mental state but because it probably explains something about the quality of her paintings. And that extreme sensitivity in her perception. Inwards and outwards.
EB: The foreignness? The way her grids feel both mathematical and deeply emotional at the same time. It is a very special duality.
CD: Yes. A very specific, strict order. Most people, when they turn inward, find familiar territory. But Martin found something else. Something that most of us don’t have easy access to. For instance, a very refined extended awareness.
EB: A different kind of inner world. Especially when it comes to the New Mexico paintings, the cycle of six works entitled With My Back to the World, which is directly associated with the quote we’re talking about, which we took from an interview by Chuck Smith in 1997.
CD: Yes. And I don’t want to elaborate on a pathological inner world. But on a different one. One that had its own logic and poetry and that is so focused on beauty.
EB: And when she painted it, she brought that beauty to the surface.
EB: And in that sense, her grids aren’t just containers for emotion. They’re containers for a specific kind of consciousness that reveals aspects of reality that are not visible in the first place. “Beauty is an awareness in the mind,” she once stated.
CD: That statement reveals so much about the paintings. That’s why they’re so strange and so beautiful at the same time. They’re not trying to be beautiful in a conventional sense. They’re trying to be true to what she was experiencing.
EB: The poetry of the non-visible world.
CD: Isn’t it that what makes her work so outstanding?
EB: Probably yes. It is fascinating that artists are capable of make the invisible visible.
CD: Sometimes through a certain principle, where a certain atmosphere can arise from. For instance, the grid in Martin’s case. It is so precise, so mathematical, but with the human touch. It’s like she’s saying: this inner world I’m experiencing has its own order. It’s not chaotic.
EB: Same with the hand-drawn lines. They’re imperfect because the hand can’t be perfect. But that imperfection is where the emotion lives. It’s the trace of her presence in the work.
CD: It is as if she is stating: This is real.
EB: So the grid is both a container and a kind of evidence.
CD: Yes. Evidence of a consciousness that most of us don’t experience. And yet when we stand in front of her paintings, we recognize something in them. We feel something that we can’t quite name.
EB: That foreignness again. Is it alienating?
CD: I don’t know. What do you think? It’s very much about beauty. And it’s also like she’s saying: there are other ways of being in the world.
EB: No wrong or right. And they are valuable.
CD: And worth paying attention to. And worth bringing to the surface. And on top of that, her works are highly elaborate on a painterly level.
EB: So when she said “I paint with my back to the world,” she wasn’t rejecting the world. She was saying: I have access to something that the world doesn’t usually see.
CD: I have a window into a different kind of consciousness and access to see and perceive beauty. And I’m going to bring that back and create beauty. Not to explain it. Not to justify it. Just to show it. It’s real. It matters.
EB: She’s not trying to be universal. She’s not trying to speak to everyone. She’s just being radically direct about what she’s experiencing. And in that radicality, she naturally becomes universal?
CD: In a way. Everyone is familiar with the feeling where the world doesn’t make sense, at least for moments. And Martin is saying: that’s okay. It is even worth painting.
EB: So the grid is a way of saying: I understand this. I can contain this.
CD: Yes. A way of saying: I am not lost. I am not confused. I am right here.
EB: I think that is quite a fantastic gift of her work.
CD: She brings the poetry of the non-visible world into visibility. And in doing so, she gives us permission to do the same. To stop pretending that what we see is all there is. To acknowledge that there are other ways of being and seeing.
EB: And that they matter. I think that was a quite an enlightening walk with our backs to the world and back.
CD: One quote, two perspectives. Along the grids.
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Voice & texts by Charlotte Desaga and Esenija Bannan.
Semi-automatically translated.
Images from our private archives.
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Source artist quote and video: Excerpt from Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World (2003), directed by Mary Lance. Instagram Reel posted by Pace Gallery.
