Agnes Martin

Grid paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, Dia Beacon From across a room an Agnes Martin canvas can look almost blank. Walk up to it and a fine grid or a few graphite lines appear. That shift from nothing to a great deal over a few steps is what the work asks you to experience, and it only happens in person. Martin said that when she first made a grid she was thinking of the innocence of trees, and she considered herself an abstract expressionist rather than a Minimalist. Dia Beacon's current show, open from April 2026 to April 2027, draws on Dia's large collection of her canvases, including Tundra of 1967, a single-color canvas split by three graphite lines into six rectangles. Natural light fills the rooms, so the lines shift with the day.