A number of works by Agnes Martin and some of her former neighbors, among them the painters Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman, were brought together in the exhibition "Nine Artists/Coenties Slip," held at the downtown branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. Although the Coenties Slip painters never constituted a formal group, they represented, in their diverse ways, a break with abstract expressionism. As more than one critic has noted, Miss Martin's work of the time does have certain affinities with Kelly's brightly colored paintings of geometrical shapes. For example, her twelve-inch-square painting Islands No. 1 (1960), a work in oil and pencil on canvas that was included in the Whitney show, consists of a rectangular grid made up of rows of short horizontal dashes arranged in pairs, the whole shape enclosed by an inch-wide border. The slight changes of spacing between the columns of dashes give the seemingly static, formal composition vitality and movement.
In the 1940s Miss Martin's work in watercolors and oils had consisted largely of somewhat conventional portraits and still lifes. As she progressed, she began, in the early 1950s, to paint biomorphic abstractions with a line that became progressively lighter and more fluid. Within a few years, however, she abandoned figurative imagery for subjective, abstract landscape forms that gradually became more geometric and discrete "simplified forms in a light-filled space, the effect provided by pale, translucent background washes. As the references to landscape diminished, the effect of impersonal objectivity increased, and the flatness and frontality of the surface plane was emphasized. In 1958 Miss Martin held her first solo exhibition, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. She subsequently exhibited works at the gallery in solo shows in 1959 and 1961.
Sometime after 1958 Miss Martin began to evolve her grid schema.
