Brice Marden's "I Am Plane Image" at Gagosian in Chelsea, NYC, Through December 12

Gagosian's West 21st Street gallery in Chelsea is presenting "Brice Marden: I Am Plane Image," a comprehensive survey of the painter's work. The show was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Brice Marden and runs from September 15 to December 12, 2026.

During the opening month, the gallery used its Instagram account to highlight one work from each decade of Marden's career. The series ended on October 15, the day he would have turned eighty-eight. The final pick was "Lingerie" (2022–23), a large canvas made in his studio in Tivoli, New York, and one of the last works he completed. The same post included a 2021 photograph of the artist in that studio, taken by Mirabelle Marden, and a 2023 studio view showing "Verve" (2023) and "Ridge" (2022–23).

The show's central subject is the painted surface itself. According to Gagosian, Marden spent his career working through a set of ideas about how to activate the surface of a painting. The concern appears as early as his Yale MFA thesis, where he wrote that he had "had to concentrate on the rectangle problems," and described himself as obsessed with the idea and fanatical about it. The exhibition title, "I Am Plane Image," is presented as a distillation of that long engagement with the plane.

Marden died in 2023. Installation views of the exhibition, photographed by Owen Conway, are published by the gallery.

For readers in Japan or visiting Chelsea, this is a chance to follow one painter's questions across several decades in a single exhibition, with the estate involved in the project. It sits in the neighborhood's cluster of West 21st Street and West 24th Street galleries, where Gagosian also has other New York spaces.