John Haber reviews the exhibition Agnes Martin: The '80s: Grey Paintings at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through October 29, 2011.

Haber writes: "Martin's museum-pieces generally run to soft primaries, earning their pale and their transparency from thin horizontals on white canvas. Nothing here looks anything less than solid. The horizontals run all the way from thin lines to thick bands, and their spacing varies as well, creating color fields without color. They do not depend on surprise or illusion, like the central cross that leaps out of Reinhardt’s blackness just in time to scare one. They ask one to consider the differences."