From early on there were endless plains and forests, vast deserts in dry pastel tones, and dense forests of vertical and horizontal buildings. In between them, clear, sometimes semi-transparent sky and clouds are tinged by the early morning sunlight and the evening glow.

Essentially, Agnes Martin's abstraction, which could only be epitomized and expressed through horizontal and vertical lines and the light between them on canvases as her terrain, resembles the nature and cityscapes of the places she had lived: Macklin in Saskatchewan, Taos in New Mexico, Vancouver, and Manhattan in New York. These various horizons and vertical lines were the foundational sites that supported her body and which her gaze endlessly met from sunrise to sunset. Coincidentally, or perhaps fatefully, even the fact that the same-sex lover she once deeply adored was a textile artist who wove horizontal and vertical lines, further upholds Martin's brilliant and obsessive line-drawing practice.

Her grids embody the horizon and structures of urbanity, and the repetition and regularity of the straight lines may be the very persistent rhythm of her self-monologue, of an endlessly lonely life. With her back turned on the world, refusing to compromise, and persisting in her artistic practice for inner enlightenment, her life can be read as a collection of almost Puritanical and Zen Buddhist thoughts and acceptance. Indeed, her seemingly straight lines, which only allow the barest material and emotional vibration through the warp and weft of the uneven graphite-traced canvas, are the minimalism of action and maximalism of non-expression.

The fact that she was once a proficient national team swimmer shows how severely she erased her body-her physical and biological identity as a living being-in her work. The moment our gaze reaches this erasure, we experience a profound sense of solemnity, humility, and deep resignation leading to tranquility. The power of her work lies precisely in this capability of extreme erasure and her mathematical precision that tolerates no deviance. As we recognize this process of drastic effacement, our gaze on that slender edge expands infinitely toward the horizon; like playing the accordion seamlessly, stretching and compressing countless strands of sound.