Brice Marden: Red Yellow Blue
This book was published on the occasion of Brice Marden: Red Yellow Blue at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. The exhibition brought together four paintings from this historic group for the first time since their making and also presented Fourth Figure (Red Yellow Blue) (1973–74), a related painting that treats the chromatic primaries as a composition of three horizontal bands.
In each of the Red Yellow Blue paintings (1973–74), Marden painted slabs of dense, nuanced color on three adjoining panels, using oil paint mixed with beeswax and turpentine. The dull sheen of the encaustic medium intensifies the bold, contrasting color blocks. The variations in “primary” colors, where red can range from cadmium to almost black, yellow from saffron to ochre, and blue from cobalt to indigo, are rich with interpretive possibilities.
The catalogue reproduces the works with color plates and installation photography and features “A Certain Disjunction of Colors,” an illustrated essay by Jeffrey Weiss that considers the series relative to the art of Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, and Jasper Johns, along with Marden’s own prior practice. It also includes several historical texts that discuss this body of work, including Linda Shearer’s essay from the 1975 Brice Marden exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, an article on Marden’s painting by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Artforum, October 1974), and a conversation between Marden, Alan Moore, Edit deAk, and Walter Robinson (Art-Rite, Spring 1975).
Publisher: Gagosian
Publication date: 2013
Contributors: Edit deAk, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Brice Marden, Alan Moore, Walter (Mike) Robinson, Linda Shearer, Jeffrey Weiss
Designer: McCall Associates, New York
Printer: Shapco Printing, Minneapolis
Format: Hardcover in dust jacket
Dimensions: 10 3/4 × 10 3/4 inches (27.5 × 27.5 cm)
Pages: 76
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-935263-87-6
