"Brice Marden was born in 1938 in Bronxville, New York. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland, from 1957 to 1958 and the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts from 1958 to 1961, where he received his BFA degree. In the summer of 1961, he attended Yale Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut, and went on to enroll at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, receiving an MFA degree in 1963.

It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that characterized his paintings of the following decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. He has described his early works as highly emotional and subjective, despite their apparent lack of referentiality....He worked as a guard in 1963 and 1964 at the Jewish Museum, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist whom he studied in depth and whose work furthered his interest in gridded compositions."

"In 1972, his work was showcased at Documenta 5 in Kassel, and he was honored with a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1975. A show of drawings made between 1964 and 1974 traveled in 1974 to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Fort Worth Art Museum; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 1977, Marden traveled to Rome and Pompeii, where he strengthened his interest in Roman and Greek art and architecture, which would influence his work in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the mid-1980s, Marden turned away from Minimalism toward gestural abstraction. Around this time, he traveled to Thailand, where he became interested in Far Eastern calligraphy and the art of the brush stroke. Marden's recent large-scale paintings continue to employ “glyphs” inspired by Asian characters. During the 1990s, Marden continued to exhibit regularly in New York. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a major retrospective of his paintings and drawing, which later traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Marden lives and works in New York."

Text excerpted from the Guggenheim Museum, New York.