Martin's artistic journey began in New York City, where she immersed herself in modern art and developed a deep interest in abstraction.

"[3] Growing up in rural Canada and influenced by the New Mexico desert, where she lived for the last several decades of her life, Martin's art was characterized by serene compositions featuring grids and lines.

Her career included numerous exhibitions, totaling over 85 solo shows, and participation in major events such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta.

Martin's artistic vision, blending minimalism and spirituality, remains an enduring and influential force in the realm of abstract art.

[10] It was while living in New York that Martin became interested in modern art and was exposed to artists such as Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), and Joan Miró (1893–1983).

[7]: 237  After hearing lectures by the Zen Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki at Columbia, she became interested in Asian thought, not as a religious discipline, but as a code of ethics, a practical how-to for getting through life.

"[15] It is worth noting that Martin herself did not identify as a feminist and even once told a New Yorker journalist in an interview that she thought "the women's movement had failed.

[17] After eighteen months on the road camping across both Canada and the western United States, Martin settled in Mesa Portales, near Cuba, New Mexico (1968-1977).

Although she still preferred solitude and lived alone, Martin was more active in the art world, travelling extensively and showing in Canada, the United States, and internationally.

That year, she settled in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where her friends and neighbors, several of whom were also affiliated with Parsons, included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Lenore Tawney.

[19] In 1961 Martin contributed a brief introduction to a brochure for her friend Lenore Tawney's first solo exhibition, the only occasion on which she wrote on the work of a fellow artist.

Cited reasons include the death of her friend Ad Reinhardt, the demolition of many buildings on Coenties Slip, and a breakup with the artist Chryssa whom Martin had dated off and on throughout the 1960s.

[14] According to a filmed interview with her that was released in 2003, she had moved from New York City only when she was told her rented loft/workspace/studio would be no longer available because of the building's imminent demolition.

Particularly in her breakthrough years of the early 1960s, she created 6 × 6 foot square canvases that were covered in dense, minute and softly delineated graphite grids.

[26] In the 1966 exhibition Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Martin's grids were therefore celebrated as examples of Minimalist art and were hung among works by artists including Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Donald Judd.

[30] Later, Martin reduced the scale of her signature 72 × 72 square paintings to 60 × 60 inches,[31] and shifted her work to use bands of ethereal color.

4 (1994), for example, one viewed the gentle striations of pencil line and primary color washes of diluted acrylic paint blended with gesso.

Lawrence Alloway noted that Martin is in the first generation of the Abstract Expressionism style, which is significant and "shows her commitment to exalted subject matter" and her ability to "transform it into the language of painting which gives the works their aura of silent dignity.

[35] Exhibitions continue to be mounted since her death in 2004, including Agnes Martin: Closing the Circle, Early and Late from February 10, 2006 to March 04, 2006 at Pace Gallery.

[24] Other exhibitions have been held in New York, Zurich, London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Cambridge (England), Aspen, Albuquerque, British Columbia in Canada.

[38][39] The exhibition included Anne Truitt, Mary Corse, and contemporary artists Shirazeh Houshiary and Tomma Abts.

From October 2015 through April 2016, Martin was exhibited in Opening the Box: Unpacking Minimalism at The George Economou Collection in Athens, Greece alongside Dan Flavin and Donald Judd.

She has featured in the ongoing exhibition Intuitive Progression at the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, New York from February 2017 to August 2017.

The exhibition went from April 2017 to August 2017 and featured Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell, Lygia Clark, Gego, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse.

[48] In 1994, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, part of the University of New Mexico, announced that it would renovate its Pueblo-revival building and dedicate one wing to Martin's work.

[49] The gallery was designed according to the artist's wishes in order to accommodate Martin's gift of seven large untitled paintings made between 1993 and 1994.

[51][52] The gift of the paintings and gallery's design and construction were negotiated and overseen by Robert M. Ellis, the Harwood's director at the time and a close friend of Martin's.

No-one who has seriously spent time before an Agnes Martin, letting its peace communicate itself, receiving its inexplicable and ineffable happiness, has ever been disappointed.

[60] Poet Victoria Chang's work With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) is in conversation with both Martin's artwork and writings.