Bow Down: Olivia Laing on Agnes Martin

The best-selling novelist and essayist, Olivia Laing nominates the influential abstract artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004). Martin – a gay, working class woman who forged a path in a male-dominated artworld – embraced solitude and didn’t have her first solo show until she was 46. With a practise inspired by Zen Buddhism, American Transcendentalist ideas and the landscape, Martin believed that to paint is to enter ‘a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean’. Olivia Laing is the author of To The River and Lonely City among other titles. Her book Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency is published in Spring 2020 and she is currently working on a book about bodies and freedom.