The title of Agnes Martin’s show at Pace Gallery, “The 80’s: Grey Paintings,” sounds less like an art exhibit than a SNL skit about a super-annoying former art star.  In reality Martin’s paintings have a fragile, personal quality that makes them hard to pin down, both in terms of time and place.  Martin came of age with the great minimalist and abstract expressionist New York painters of the 1960’s, but ran away to New Mexico and stopped painting altogether for a while.  Looking at her paintings today, they seem to get at the fundamental conundrum that a painting is both its own new world and a canvas covered with paint.

The works at Pace, all six-by-six-feet squares, have been carefully gridded with graphite and filled with washes of white and light grey paint.  They are delicate – one needs to step right in front of them to see them – and they are luminous and musical.  I’m reminded of Robert Ryman, who also painted mesmerizing all-white squares.  But Ryman’s canvases are highly fetishized objects, all about the richness of the surface.  In contrast Martin’s canvases seem ideal, like fields of possibility.