Which minimalist artist painted subtle grids and lines, often in pale colors?

Agnes Martin painted subtle grids and lines, often in pale colors. Her restrained canvases use delicate graphite lines, repeated bands, and softly washed color to create surfaces that appear quiet, precise, and almost weightless.

Martin developed her best-known grid paintings in New York during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many were large square canvases, including works roughly six feet by six feet, covered with fine, lightly drawn lines. Although the grids suggest mechanical regularity, small variations reveal the artist’s hand rather than industrial manufacture.

Her paintings were shown alongside Minimalist artists, including Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Ryman, in the Guggenheim’s 1966 exhibition Systemic Painting. For that reason, Martin is frequently discussed in relation to Minimalism. Yet she resisted a purely impersonal interpretation of her work and emphasized spiritual, emotional, and contemplative experience.

Readers sometimes confuse Martin’s pale grids with hard-edged geometric abstraction. Her lines were often intuitive, and her color became especially luminous after she moved to New Mexico and later returned to painting in the 1970s.