ART CITIES:London-Mary Corse

Mary Corse is associated with the 1960s Light & Space Movement, and is primarily known for her minimalist, monochromatic paintings, which explore the relationship between materiality and perception. Since the mid-1960s, Corse has developed an innovative technique that involves mixing acrylic paint with tiny glass beads commonly used in the white lines of lane dividers on highways and painting vertical bands onto the canvas. These fields have an illuminating effect, so that as viewers move in front of the painting, oscillating bands of varying color and texture are exposed, darkening and brightening before their eyes.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lisson Gallery Archive

Mary Corse in her solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London presents ten works spanning from 2003 to 2018, including seven new works created specifically for the exhibition. The presentation include a selection from Corse’s “White Black White” and “White Inner Band” painting series, and a lightbox composed of argon and Plexiglas. In 1963 Mary Corse received a BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied psychology, and in 1968 an MFA from the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, where she studied painting, philosophy, and Tibetan Buddhism. In the mid-1960s, she produced white monochromes on shaped canvases and Plexiglas constructions illuminated by fluorescent light bulbs. One such work, “Untitled (Space + Electric Light)” (1968/2017), that is on presentation in the exhibition is a glowing cube made from Plexiglas, neon, and tesla, a high-voltage, low-current energy system. In 1968, she began incorporating glass microspheres, tiny prismatic beads often embedded into highway dividers for their reflective properties, into her paintings and blended them with different shades of acrylic, a technique that still forms the basis of her work. Corse is often considered part of the Light and Space movement, an otherwise male-dominated movement that developed in Southern California in the 1960s and includes Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler. However, Corse maintains that, at least in the 1960s, she was neither part of the group nor influenced by their work. Nonetheless, this set of loosely affiliated artists worked with the medium of light, using reflective or transparent surfaces like resin or Plexiglas, or specific materials or technologies developed for the car or aviation industries. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Corse briefly switched her production to large paintings with heavy slabs in dark clay, but soon returned to painting and incorporating microspheres into the medium. Her technique transforms opaque and blank Minimalist canvases into surfaces on which hard-edged stripes or blocks and gestural brushstrokes seem to appear and disappear. The visual instability of Corse’s canvases underscores the artist’s conviction that perception is the most important aesthetic act and that these seeming accidents of perception are more interesting than accidental gestures by the artist on the canvas. This position subtly undermines the tenets of Minimalism. While that style tends to refute gestural works, Corse’s canvases incorporate both gesture and chance into an otherwise Minimalist framework.

Info: Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street, London, Duration: 11/5-23/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.lissongallery.com