Brice Marden (b. 1938)

Brice Marden’s Masking Drawings came to be in an organic, somewhat serendipitous way. When working on his well-known monochromatic panels, Marden would slide sheets of paper underneath the panel edges to catch excess drips and splashes of paint. He would reuse these sheets of paper, or “masks,” over several occasions and ultimately, having fallen in love with the composition that resulted, decided to recycle them into works themselves: the Masking Drawings. Their origin—from the irregular and uncalculated, versus the orderly and premeditated—offers an ideological deviation from Marden’s body of work, while still maintaining a direct relationship to it.