Mary Corse's first solo museum survey is a long overdue examination of this singular artist's career. Initially trained as an abstract painter, Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, CA) emerged in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement. She shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both a subject and material of art. Yet while others largely migrated away from painting into sculptural and environmental projects, Corse approached the question of light through painting. This focused exhibition highlights critical moments of experimentation as Corse engaged with tropes of modernist painting, from the monochrome to the grid, while charting her own course through studies in quantum physics and complex investigations into a range of "painting" materials, from fluorescent light and Plexiglas to metallic flakes, glass microspheres, and clay. The survey will bring together for the first time Corse's key bodies of work-including her early shaped canvases, freestanding sculptures, and light encasements that she engineered in the mid-1960s, in her early twenties, as well as her breakthrough White Light Paintings, begun in 1968, and the Black Earth Series that she initiated after moving in 1970 from downtown Los Angeles to Topanga Canyon, where she lives and works today.
Initially trained as an abstract painter, Mary Corse (b. 1945) emerged in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the California Light and Space movement. This catalogue is the first comprehensive examination of this singular artist's work, and features new scholarship and object studies that underscore how Corse’s groundbreaking approach to light, perception, and subjectivity forged a new language of painting. Over more than five decades, Corse has maintained a commitment to abstraction and belief in modernist painting even as she charted her own course through her studies in quantum physics and investigations into a range of unconventional materials, from Tesla coils and neon to glass microbeads and glitter. Kim Conaty’s essay investigates how the artist’s early experiments with light—creating “paintings” made of fluorescent or neon—made way for her subsequent explorations into how light might be integrated into the surface of her canvases through the interplay of reflection and refraction. Corse’s exquisite paintings activate the viewer in the creation of the perceptual experience: the kinetic effect of the work is contingent upon the movement of the body through space. As Corse has explained: “Art is not on the wall, it’s in your perception.”
