ART-PRESENTATION: Mary Corse-A Survey in Light

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 Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: LACMA Archive

Though Mary Corse is associated with the first generation of California Light and Space artists, “A Survey in Light” is the first museum exhibition devoted exclusively to her work. The exhibition with 20 paintings, 2 sculptures, and 3prints, 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 Los Angeles to Topanga Canyon, where she lives and works today. 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. Mary Corse’s early works from 1964–1966 capture her range of experimentation as her studio became a laboratory for formal and material investigation. One of Corse’s first shaped paintings “Untitled (Octagonal Blue” (1964), reveals the artist’s early interest in making a large encompassing field of color that breaks free of a standard rectilinear format and suggests an expanded compositional space. In an early effort to suffuse her paintings with light, she experimented with reflective materials, sprinkling tiny metal flakes across this work’s painted surface. For the artist, the subtle sheen produced by the metal fell short of achieving the inner glow she was seeking, leading her to explore the perceptual possibilities of standard white acrylic paint. Corse’s foundational explorations from this time set in motion much of what was to come in the subsequent years. In 1966 Corse engineered her first electric light boxes. These “light paintings,” as she has described them, prompted a brief but transformative shift away from the canvas as she replaced painted white fields with radiant fluorescent light. Over the next two years Corse developed a series of argon light boxes such as “Untitled (electric Light)” (1968/2019) that are suspended from the ceiling and powered wirelessly with a Tesla coil, a high-frequency generator that transmits an electromagnetic field through a wall. Corse began taking physics classes, she needed to pass a proficiency test to procure certain capacitors and wires, which upended her worldview. She interpreted the ideas of quantum physics in relation to her own artistic concerns, recognizing that perception is always subjective and that uncertainty is at play in all systems. A few years later, when driving through Malibu one evening, Corse made a serendipitous observation. She noticed that when light struck the painted highway lines in front of her, they illuminated for an instant as she drove past. Realizing that the same glass microspheres embedded in road paint could be used to transform her white paintings into light-responsive works, Corse began covering the surfaces of canvases with these tiny refractive beads. In the resulting White Light series, begun in 1968, Corse embraced the potential for her paintings to exist in ever-changing states, to appear alternatively flat and full of brushwork, depending on the positions of the viewer that allowed her brushwork to shine through and serve as the distinguishing feature as she varied the direction of her brushstrokes from painting to painting. When Corse first exhibited her White Light grid paintings in the early 1970s, she presented them in pairs, side-by-side, acknowledging that their compositional distinctions are best understood in relation to one another. Since the 1970s Corse has pushed the formal and perceptual possibilities of her White Light paintings to ever more complex ends. She has worked in increasingly larger formats, integrated new motifs such as arches and bands, and incorporated black and occasionally color alongside her glowing white fields. Corse’s most elusive “White Light” paintings are her “Inner Band” series. These works are defined by an interior band (or multiple bands) that mysteriously shifts in and out of view as the viewer walks alongside them. They have no ideal vantage point and cannot be fixed to a single image, underscoring the subjectivity of perception and acknowledging that everyone experiences visual phenomena differently. With their inconstant surfaces and  immersive scale, the “Inner Band” paintings encourage an active viewing experience that directly engages viewers as participants.

Info: Curator: Carol S. Eliel, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, Duration: 28/7-11/11/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu 11:00-17:00, Fri 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.lacma.org