Still Life, Window

Knox Martin

1987

In synthetic polymer paint and pencil on paper, Knox Martin compresses a still life into a carnival of shapes and patterns, using bright color and jagged mark-making to turn ordinary objects into a dynamic, pictorial game.

You’re struck by a flattened, decorative field—serpentine yellow forms studded with red triangles, pastel bands and staccato red marks—whose lively brushwork, scribbled pencil lines and the artist’s scrawled signature make the surface feel immediate and improvised.

Martin fuses the bravura color and scale of postwar New York painting with the intimacy of drawing, helping to blur the lines between painting, drawing and muralism and pointing toward a more graphic, pattern-driven direction in contemporary still life.

Palette

Exhibitions

American Drawings and Watercolors: A Selection from the Collection

1969

The New American Painting as Shown in Eight European Countries 1958...

1959

Painting and Sculpture Collection: Reinstallation of the East Wing

1978

Selections from the Permanent Collection: Drawings

1984