Cold Mountain 6 (Bridge)
Brice Marden
BRICE MARDEN, 1991. OIL ON LINEN.
Inspired by the poems of Hanshan, a 9th Century Chinese poet who lived in willing exile in the mountains where he wrote his poems on rocks, trees and cave walls, Marden created 6 large scale works. Hanshan’s poems are immensely spirituality in the Taoist and Zen traditions, and Marden’s work are implicitly informed by this. Bridging a gap between the real and the imagined, the formal and the abstract, the natural and the unnatural, Cold Mountain 6 is about the in-between space where peace lives. He painted the canvases from the bottom to top and left to write, so as to mirror the Chinese writing system and in this way the painting can be seen also as calligraphic abstractions. What is left behind when we remove meaning from beauty?