Lehmann Maupin (Booth A3) is pleased to announce its participation in ADAA The Art Show 2013 with a solo presentation by Mary Corse.
For The Art Show, Mary Corse has created six new monochromatic white paintings that reveal her ongoing exploration of radiant and reflective surfaces using an innovative technique she developed by blending different shades of acrylic paint with microspheres, tiny glass beads known for their uniquely reflective properties. This unorthodox material, which Corse first experimented with in 1968, creates a prismatic quality that affects a viewer’s perception of the surface based on changing light conditions or their relative position to the work. Because Corse's minimalist paintings transform before our eyes, exposing oscillating bands of varying color and gestural brushstrokes, they have no fixed appearance, and as such, reveal the subjective nature of perception in progress.
Coming of age alongside the Southern California “Light and Space” artists of the 1960s, Corse developed her own distinctive style of painting independent of the male-dominated movement that was taking place around her. In 1965, at the age of nineteen, she gained recognition for a body of work that included white monochromes on shaped canvases and illuminated Plexiglas boxes that masked their power source and appeared to float against the wall. A few years later, Corse enrolled in a Physics course at the University of Southern California where she hoped to learn how to generate internal light sources. Her exposure to theoretical quantum physics solidified her interest in perception. One year later, she would begin painting with glass microspheres, of which Corse has said, “they create a prism that brings the surface into view. I like that because it brings the viewer into the light as well.” Although Corse is known for her use of these tiny beads, throughout her career she has experimented with metal glitter and glazed ceramic tile, or ‘earth slabs,’ among other material, with the same intent to explore their reflective or prismatic properties and the notions of perception.
In 2012, after announcing representation of the artist a year earlier, Lehmann Maupin presented Corse’s first solo show in New York in more than fifteen years.
Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, California) received her B.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1963, and her M.F.A. from the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), Los Angeles, in 1968. Corse’s work was recently exhibited in several historically significant exhibitions including Venice in Venice, a collateral exhibition organized for the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2011-12), which traveled to the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2012); Phenomenal: California Light and Space, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2011-12); and Surface, Support, Process: The 1960s Monochrome at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012). Corse is the recipient of a Theodoron Award, Guggenheim Museum (1971); a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1975); and a Cartier Foundation Award (1993), among other distinctions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. Corse lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
For further information, please contact Jennifer Joy at 212 255 2923, jjoy@lehmannmaupin.com, or visit www.lehmannmaupin.com. For gallery news and exclusive updates become a Facebook Fan of Lehmann Maupin.