Marcia Hafif

(American, 1929–2018)

Marcia Hafif was an American artist known for her painted explorations of materiality and the perception of color. Hafif’s monochromes probed the formal components of the medium while also tethering those concerns to an outside motif. “The subject can be anything from designing a museum to the writing of foreign calligraphy, from naming weeds to making ice in the desert using cold night winds,” she once explained. “For me they are all experiments for the purpose of seeing more closely.” Born Marcia Jean Woods on August 15, 1929 in Pomona, CA, she studied at Pomona College where she met her future husband, an art history student of the Italian Renaissance named Herbert Hafif. The couple lived in Italy between 1961 and 1969, where the artist became enamored of Piero della Francesca and other early Renaissance painters. Returning to the United States, she went on to receive her MFA from the University of California, Irvine before moving to New York in 1971. Unlike many other monochromatic paintings produced during the 1970s, rather than seeking to erase the hand of the artist, Hafif like Robert Ryman, showed visible brushstrokes. During the following decades, she divided her time between New York and California. Hafif died on April 17, 2018 in Laguna Beach, CA. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.