Abstract Painter Agnes Martin Dies at 92

[Khephra]

The Wave, 1963

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Agnes Martin, one of the world's foremost abstract artists, whose spare paintings reflected the simple life she sought, died Thursday. She was 92.

Martin died at 6 a.m. at the Plaza de Retiro, a retirement community in Taos, N.M., said William Himes, the community's owner and administrator. Martin had lived a simple life in the artists' haven in northern New Mexico since 1991, even as her art grew in popularity in major cities throughout the world.

She was one of America's most distinguished artists with an "amazing ability to reduce to essence all that we feel about space and light," said Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian's American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. "She stands for an awful lot in the story of contemporary art over the past 50 years."

Martin's abstracts have been included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London. In 1998, she won the National Endowment for the Arts' prestigious National Medal of Art.



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