The Elkon Gallery is pleased to present AGNES MARTIN: Works on Paper from the 1960s, which features fourteen exceptional works.
In 1961, Leo Castelli encouraged Robert Elkon to open a gallery, and suggested that Agnes Martin be his first represented artist. That same year, Elkon opened his eponymous Madison Avenue gallery with a solo exhibition of her new works.
During this period, Martin lived and worked in Lower Manhattan and later at Coenties Slip, alongside artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Robert Indiana. Many of the works from these years reveal her signature hand-drawn lines and grids, subtle arches, and delicate washes of watercolor and muted tones.
Robert Elkon maintained a close professional relationship with Agnes Martin for the following fourteen years, placing her works with important museums and private collections worldwide.
In the mid-1970s, Martin left New York for New Mexico, where she continued to refine her quiet and contemplative visual language. Reflecting the luminous simplicity and meditative sensibility that emerged during her years in Taos, the exhibition also includes a 12-inch Untitled painting executed later in the artist’s life.
All of the works on paper presented in this exhibition passed through Robert Elkon’s gallery during the years of his collaboration with Martin while she was living and working in New York. Many of the works were included in the artist’s retrospective that traveled between 2015 and 2017 to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The exhibition remains on view through July 24, 2026.
