Brice Marden (born October 15, 1938), American, generally described as a Minimalist artist, although his work defies specific categorization.

He was born in Bronxville, New York and grew up in nearby Briarcliff Manor. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland (1957 to 1958) and received his BFA at Boston University, School of Fine and Applied Arts (1961). He earned his MFA at Yale University School of Art and Architecture (1963) where he studied with Esteban Vicente, Alex Katz, Jon Schueler, Jack Tworkov, Reginald Pollack, Philip Pearlstein, and Gabor Peterdi. Among his fellow students were Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Robert Mangold.

It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that would characterize his drawings and paintings of the following decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. In his early work from the 1960s and into the 1970s, he used simplified means, typically monochrome canvases either alone or in series of panels (diptychs or triptychs), to achieve what he considered to be highly emotional and subjective representations. These include such works as The Dylan Painting, 1966; 1986 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); Fave, 1968-69 (Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin); and Lethykos (for Tonto), 1976 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Marden moved to New York in 1963 where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist who he studied in depth while employed as a guard at the Jewish Museum, New York during Johns's 1964 retrospective held there. The following summer Marden traveled to Paris where he began to make compressed charcoal and graphite grid-patterned drawings. Marden's graphic works have always constituted an important corollary to his paintings, and he would transfer ideas ignited by these early works into even his most recent paintings and drawings. It was also in Paris that he admired the work of Alberto Giacometti and Jean Fautrier, although masters such as Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velásquez, and Edouard Manet have also informed Marden's artistic practice.

In 1966, at Dorothea Rockburne's suggestion, Marden was hired by Robert Rauschenberg to work as his assistant. That same year he had his first solo show in New York at the Bykert Gallery, which exhibited the first of his classic oil and beeswax paintings. Marden's paintings are often borne from a particular experience or in reaction to having spent time in a particular place. In 1971, he and his wife, Helen Harrington, visited the Greek island of Hydra where they have returned to every year since, and that has greatly affected his work (see, for instance, the five Grove Group paintings, 1972-1980; Souvenir de Grèce works on paper, 1974-1996).

In 1983, he and his family traveled to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India, where he became fascinated by Asian culture, art, and landscape. Marden has subsequently incorporated numerous elements from these traditions and made them key to his process (Shell Drawings, 1985-87). A visit in 1984 to an exhibition of Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8th-19th Century inspired his interest in calligraphy, a predominant influence in his recent work, as seen in the acclaimed Cold Mountain series of paintings and works on paper (1989-1991). In 2000, Marden embarked on the most ambitious paintings of his career, The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, two of which measure 24 feet long. He is considered to be one of the more important American painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In fact, one critic recently described him as "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades". (Peter Schjeldhal, The New Yorker, November 6, 2006)

Marden has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions, and has also been the subject of numerous one-person shows and retrospectives, beginning with his 1975 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. From October 29, 2006 to January 15, 2007, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented "Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings", according to MoMA "an unprecedented gathering of his work, with more than fifty paintings and an equal number of drawings, organized chronologically, drawn from all phases of the artist's career". The show traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, February 23, 2007 to May 13, 2007; and then to Berlin at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, June 12 to October 7, 2007.

In 1988, Marden became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2000, Brown University awarded the artist an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts.

His daughter, Mirabelle Marden, is a proprietor of Rivington Arms, an art gallery in New York. She is also an accomplished photographer.

Biographical information from Wikipedia