Martin, Agnes (1912- ), Canadian-American abstract artist known for her spare, meditative works, square canvases which are painted in pale, delicate tones and overlaid with a rectangular grid of pencil lines. Martin was born to a Saskatchewan farming family and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied art and education first at Western Washington College of Education in Bellingham, Washington, and then at Columbia University in New York City, where she earned a B.S. degree in 1942. She attended the University of New Mexico from 1946 to 1947, later returning to Columbia University to earn a M.A. degree in 1952. She became a United States citizen in 1950.

Although Martin's work is linked to the minimal art movement, unlike the minimalist artists, Martin does not use mechanical means to draw the repetitive pencil lines typical to her artwork. Although these lines conform to a strictly conceived grid pattern, the slight irregularities introduced by Martin's hand result in a surface that appears to vibrate slightly, and exhibits a human quality quite unlike the mechanized perfection of most minimalist art. Martin is more accurately grouped with the color-field painters of abstract expressionism, especially American artists Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who share with her an interest in expressing a personal and spiritual vision through the medium of formal abstractions.

During a period in New Mexico in the mid-1950s, Martin became interested in a local school of abstraction, and under this influence she created some of her first abstract paintings. She then met a New York City gallery owner who encouraged her to move back to New York City in 1957 and who presented Martin's first solo exhibition the following year. About this time, Martin began to explore forms of the grid, a theme that held her attention for the rest of her career. She used mixed media in early works such as The Laws (1958, private collection), which is composed of boat spikes and oil paint on wood, but most of her later works are more straightforward compositions in oil on canvas or watercolor on paper. She explored many creative possibilities within the highly structured confines of the grid, including varying the subtly modulated background colors and gradually transforming the grids into rows of rectangles and then stripes, as in Untitled #9 (1990, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City).

From 1967 to 1974 Martin stopped painting, spending this time traveling and then building her own house from adobe and logs in a remote region of New Mexico. In 1973 she was offered a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and she subsequently resumed painting. In 1977 she released a feature-length motion picture, Gabriel (completed 1976). A book of Martin's writings, entitled Writings/Schriften, was published in 1992 in both German and English to accompany an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum (art museum) in Winterthur, Switzerland.