Mary Corse, Untitled (White Light Series), 1966, fluorescent light, plexiglass, and acrylic on wood, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, gift, Michael Straus, 2016, © Mary Corse.
Mary Corse: A Survey in Light – LACMA The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents ‘Mary Corse: A Survey in Light’, the artist’s first solo museum survey, from July 28 through November 11, 2019.]]>
Source: LACMA
The exhibition, with 20 paintings, two sculptures, and three prints, brings 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. Also featured are 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. Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with LACMA, Mary Corse: A Survey in Light was on view at the Whitney from June 8–November 25, 2018. The presentation at LACMA is organized by Carol S. Eliel, the museum’s senior curator of Modern Art.
After early abstract work, Mary Corse emerged in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s as an artist associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement. She shared with her Southern California contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both subject and material of art. This focused exhibition, organized in loose chronological order, highlights critical moments of experimentation as Corse engaged with tropes of modernist painting while charting her own course through studies in quantum physics and complex investigations into a range of “painting” materials.
The majority of works in the exhibition are paintings on canvas or board, featuring refractive materials such as glass microspheres and reflective acrylic squares. The remaining works include two sculptural paintings made out of Plexiglas and light fixtures, two free-standing sculptures, one wall-bound ceramic “painting,” and three prints. The exhibition includes three paintings from LACMA’s permanent collection, “Untitled (Hexagonal White)” (1965), “Untitled (White Arch Inner Band Series)” (1966), and “Untitled (Black Grid)” (1988), the last of which is unique to the presentation at LACMA.
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