Untitled Number 5 1975

Agnes Martin made this painting called ‘Untitled Number 5’ with acrylic and graphite on canvas. I can just imagine Agnes standing in front of this enormous square, quietly contemplating the canvas. It’s like she's trying to enter into a dialogue with it. The canvas is all soft yellow and white stripes. Each stripe is very slightly different. She might have been thinking about the light in the desert, where she spent a lot of time in her later years. Or she may be thinking about the grid itself - it's like an abstract idea of infinite space. It’s really important to Agnes’s work that the grid isn’t perfect; it’s all about the subtle imperfections, like the graphite lines wavering slightly, creating a gentle rhythm. These reveal the artist's hand and invite us into her own experience of seeing, thinking, and feeling. Barnett Newman famously said that he was trying to paint the sublime, but I suspect Agnes was painting something much more modest, something much more human. I think they would have had a lot to talk about.