Having first gained recognition in the 1960s Southern California art scene, working alongside the generation of ‘Light and Space’ artists, Mary Corse continues to be a prominent and influential figure today. Corse is best known for her exploration of radiant and reflective surfaces and her innovative technique of painting with glass microspheres. For her inaugural exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, Mary Corse presents five new paintings displaying her signature style. In Corse’s work, three outstanding themes are most conspicuous: perception, time, and inner dimensions.
Because Mary Corse’s works change before our eyes with the slightest shift in viewing position or ambient light, in situ they have no fixed objective appearance independent of a dynamic individual perception. The works therefore do not depict perception, but reveal the nature and operation of the perceptive act in progress. They enact rather than represent our experience of reality. Since this dynamic quality reveals itself in time as the light changes or as one traverses the field of view, the work also poses a temporal dynamic wholly contrived by the artist. A vision of adjacent works in the gallery space compounds this effect. Since, traditionally, paintings are “frozen” with respect to time while real time never stops, this dynamic addresses the nature of realism in a more fundamental way. Even though the artist employs a two-dimensional surface, one’s changing perception of that surface constantly yields multiple inner dimensions in dynamic tension with each other. Since these tensions most often may be grouped under the general categories of Minimalist flatness, and painterly abstraction, the works implicitly subsume and transcend two earlier art historical epochs, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. The works’ integration of these three themes both expresses and renders tangible the perceptive faculty.
Source: Lehmann Maupin
Having first gained recognition in the 1960s Southern California art scene, working alongside the generation of ‘Light and Space’ artists, Mary Corse continues to be a prominent and influential figure today. Corse is best known for her exploration of radiant and reflective surfaces and her innovative technique of painting with glass microspheres. For her inaugural exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, Mary Corse presents five new paintings displaying her signature style. In Corse’s work, three outstanding themes are most conspicuous: perception, time, and inner dimensions.
Because Mary Corse’s works change before our eyes with the slightest shift in viewing position or ambient light, in situ they have no fixed objective appearance independent of a dynamic individual perception. The works therefore do not depict perception, but reveal the nature and operation of the perceptive act in progress. They enact rather than represent our experience of reality. Since this dynamic quality reveals itself in time as the light changes or as one traverses the field of view, the work also poses a temporal dynamic wholly contrived by the artist. A vision of adjacent works in the gallery space compounds this effect. Since, traditionally, paintings are “frozen” with respect to time while real time never stops, this dynamic addresses the nature of realism in a more fundamental way. Even though the artist employs a two-dimensional surface, one’s changing perception of that surface constantly yields multiple inner dimensions in dynamic tension with each other. Since these tensions most often may be grouped under the general categories of Minimalist flatness, and painterly abstraction, the works implicitly subsume and transcend two earlier art historical epochs, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. The works’ integration of these three themes both expresses and renders tangible the perceptive faculty.
Source: Lehmann Maupin
