Brice Marden’s New York Return Arrives With a Catalogue Raisonné and a Major Gagosian Survey
Brice Marden’s paintings are about to reappear in New York with unusual breadth. This fall, Gagosian will open I Am Plane Image at its Chelsea flagship on September 10, bringing together works that span six decades of the American artist’s career and marking the first major New York survey of his paintings in 20 years.
The exhibition is being presented alongside Brice Marden: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 1961–2023, a project Marden began with scholar Tiffany Bell in 2019 and that his family helped complete after his death in 2023. The catalogue records nearly 500 paintings made between 1961 and 2023, including nearly 90 works that had not previously been published. In a notable detail, many of the entries are accompanied by Marden’s own words.
For Marden’s daughters, Mirabelle and Melia, the process of assembling the catalogue was as emotional as it was archival. As they moved through their father’s life’s work, they encountered paintings they had not looked at in years, along with his writings, including his Yale MFA thesis. What emerged, they said, was a striking continuity: although Marden’s visual language shifted from the waxy monochromes of the 1960s to later looping, calligraphic compositions, the underlying questions remained the same. Surface, space, color, and the physical act of painting continued to anchor the work.
That continuity shapes I Am Plane Image, which draws from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, private collections, and Marden’s estate. Several of the works have rarely been shown publicly, and some have never been seen before. The newest paintings in the exhibition are The Dance and Lingerie, completed in 2022 and 2023, among the last works Marden finished before his death.
The title itself comes from Marden’s writing and reflects a lifelong concern with the picture plane, an idea he pursued from his student years to the end of his career. Larry Gagosian, who first encountered Marden’s work in the 1970s and later became both dealer and friend, described the artist as relentlessly committed to making. That sense of sustained attention now extends beyond the gallery walls: Gagosian is also expected to bring a major Marden painting to Art Basel later this month.
For a painter so often associated with restraint, the scale of this moment feels expansive. The catalogue and the exhibition together offer a rare view of an artist whose work kept returning, with quiet insistence, to the same essential problems — and never exhausted them.
