ATHENS – As part of the exhibition series Divine Dialogues this year the Museum of Cycladic Art (MCA) invites American artist Brice Marden to present his work in dialogue with selected antiquities from the Museum’s permanent collections. The exhibition titled Brice Marden and Greek Antiquity will be held at the Stathatos Mansion and will run from May 20-August 29. This is the first museum exhibition devoted to this renowned artist to be held in Greece, and is organized by the MCA in close collaboration with Marden and curator and artist Dimitrios Antonitsis.

Marden, now in his 80s with a career that spans six decades, continues to fascinate with the gestural simplicity of his paintings and drawings. His work draws from art’s long history, combining elements of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, as well as ancient calligraphy and poetry.

For 50 years, the artist has drawn inspiration from the Greek landscape and antiquity. His relationship with Greece dates back to 1971. Enchanted by the Greek light, Marden and his wife and fellow painter, Helen, bought their first house on Hydra. Since then, they have spent a portion of almost every summer there together. The purity of Hydra’s landscape deeply affected Marden, who observes nature and creates.

The exhibition at the MCA will include artworks from a wide range of Marden’s artistic output, revealing a resonance with the metaphysics of ancient Greek heritage. Paintings, drawings, and notebooks that highlight his sharp observation and unique abstract gaze, will be presented in dialogue with selected antiquities from the Museum’s permanent collections, inviting the viewer to interpret the visual vocabulary of this great artist.

A few words about Brice Marden

Brice Marden was born in 1938 in Bronxville, NY, and lives and works in New York. His work is included in the collections of museums worldwide including Tate, London; Kunstmuseum Basel; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Saint Louis Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa.

Notable exhibitions include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1975); Paintings, Drawings, Etchings 1975–80, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1981, traveled to Whitechapel Art Gallery, London); Cold Mountain, Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1991, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Menil Collection, Houston; and Städtisches Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany); A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006–07, traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin); Morocco, Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech, Morocco (2019); Think of Them as Spaces: Brice Marden’s Drawings, Menil Collection, Houston (2020); and Brice Marden. Inner Space, Kunstmuseum Basel (2022).

More information is available online: www.cycladic.gr.

Follow on Facebook: CycladicArtMuseum

Instagram: Cycladic_museum

LinkedIn: The Museum of Cycladic Art.