Within this retrospective, there is a small, darkly lit room containing a collection of works on paper made throughout Agnes Martin’s career. The room functions as a miniretrospective, where drawing is positioned as a spiral from which to view the vertiginous movement of Martin’s practice as a whole. The movement is the act of decreation. Martin’s watercolor Summer, 1964, figures decreation as bathos: The viewer is invited to plunge headfirst into the surface of her watercolor, only to drown in its content, as if the viewer were overwhelmed by its pull downward to the depths of the picture.

In Martin’s case, the act of reworking is not figured as ascension to a higher order, but descent and compulsion to a fallen state. Untitled, 1966, an ink wash on paper, emits a darker image where a grid is articulated by white lines on a black ground. The perfection of a blank surface is exchanged for slight imperfections of a series of pencil marks. The small work Balconies, 1962, enacts this double movement of decreation as a type of caesura. Horizontal lines of unequal length parry angled vertical markings. The movement oscillates, without resolution, between them. Placing the grid at an angle disrupts a view of the world as one of order. The descent is a mark of the brokenness of that world’s fall.

— Andrew Witt