Three years after Brice Marden’s death, his daughters found themselves looking at nearly every painting he had ever made.
The occasion was the completion of Brice Marden: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 1961–2023, a project the artist began with scholar Tiffany Bell in 2019 and one that his family helped bring to completion after his death in 2023. This fall, the publication will be accompanied by I Am Plane Image, a major survey at Gagosian that brings together paintings spanning six decades of Marden’s career.
Opening September 10 at the gallery’s Chelsea flagship, the exhibition marks the first major survey of Marden’s paintings in New York in twenty years. Drawn from museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as private collections and the artist’s estate, it will include works that have rarely—and in some cases never—been seen publicly.
For Larry Gagosian, who first encountered Marden’s work in the 1970s and later became both his dealer and close friend, the exhibition offers a chance to see the artist’s career in full. “He worked all the time,” Gagosian told ARTnews. “No matter whether he was in Greece or in Marrakesh or in Tivoli or in the city, he was always working. If not painting, drawing.” Looking back, Gagosian said what stands out most was Marden’s “total dedication to his art.”
Tiffany Bell, ed. “Brice Marden: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 1961–2023” (New York: Gagosian, in collaboration with the Estate of Brice Marden, 2026), distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut and London. Courtesy Gagosian.
That commitment became especially clear as Marden’s daughters, Mirabelle and Melia, worked on the catalogue raisonné. “I didn’t expect it to be so emotional,” Melia said. “Just seeing his whole life’s work laid out and how beautiful some of these paintings were—ones I hadn’t looked at in years or thought about. It was just really moving.”
The catalogue documents nearly 500 paintings made between 1961 and 2023, including nearly 90 previously unpublished works. More unusually, many of the entries are accompanied by Marden’s own words. “All the captions for all the works are all his words,” Melia said. “It’s really amazing, just to hear his voice talking about each piece.”
As they worked through the project, the sisters revisited their father’s Yale MFA thesis and other writings. What struck them was how little the central questions had changed. “What he was dealing with was the exact same set of issues or problems that he had with painting,” Mirabelle said. The observation offers a useful lens through which to think about the upcoming the exhibition. While Marden’s visual language evolved dramatically—from the waxy monochromes of the 1960s to the looping calligraphic paintings that followed—he spent decades returning to the same fundamental questions about surface, space, color, and the physical act of painting.
The latest pictures in the show are The Dance and Lingerie, two large paintings completed in 2022 and 2023 among the last works Marden finished before he died. Several works in the exhibition come from the artist’s personal collection and were fixtures of family life for decades. “We’ve grown up seeing them so much,” Mirabelle said. “They’re very personal. No one else has seen them, which I keep forgetting.”
In addition to the exhibition and catalogue raisonné, Gagosian is expected to bring a major Marden painting to Art Basel later this month, placing the artist’s work before one of the art world’s largest international audiences.
The exhibition’s title comes from Marden’s own writing. Long before it became the name of a survey, “I Am Plane Image” was part of the artist’s thinking about painting and the picture plane, an idea he pursued from his student days through the final years of his career.
For Mirabelle, the phrase captures something else as well. “I like that it’s present tense,” she said. “The paintings are now. And they will keep going.”
