ART CITIES: N.York-Mary Weatherford

Mary Weatherford creates large paintings comprising grounds of spontaneously sponged paint on heavy linen canvases, often surmounted by one or more carefully shaped and placed colored neon tubes. The canvas, prepared with white gesso mixed with marble dust and worked on with Flashe paint, a highly pigmented but readily diluted emulsion, supports startlingly diverse applications of color. The surface of the paint ranges from matte and velvety to transparent and translucent.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

New paintings and works on paper by Mary Weatherford are on show in her solo exhibition “Sea and Space”. Dominated by the color green, Weatherford’s new paintings make visual reference to arboreal and aquatic environments. Some of them also revivify the pairing of empyreal and oceanic imagery that appeared in her work decades ago. There are allusions, too, to outer space, an interest reflected in and maintained by Weatherford’s collection of NASA photographs and by her visits to the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Weatherford’s work is rooted in her experience and observation of urban and rural environments, which she employs as prompts to investigate the properties of light, color, and gesture. Often drawing inspiration from the kinds of commonplace and organic materials identified with Arte Povera, she has also studied American abstract painters of the 1950s and 1960s such as Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Further imbuing her paintings with spatial illusion and a spirit of existential inquiry, Weatherford has incorporated additional materials such as shells, sponges, bottle caps, and neon lights. To produce this series of paintings, Weatherford poured pale-toned paint into still-wet areas of darker pigment in each composition while the linen was stapled onto a wooden platform on her studio floor. She worked on several such panels simultaneously, adopting similar starting points in each work and arriving at highly divergent end results. The paintings share the atmospheric tonality and suggestions of glimmering light seen in her recent series “The Flaying of Marsyas” (2022) (which was itself inspired by Titian’s masterpiece of circa 1570–76). Weatherford’s painting “The Emersonian” (2023) invokes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature,” in which the Transcendentalist describes becoming a “transparent eyeball”—a poetic metaphor for a certain state of being, achievable only in nature, that affords new ways of perceiving. In the painting, a pale green eye emerges from within an arrangement of darker colors that hints at a cluster of ancient trees”. The exhibition’s works on paper, all made in summer 2023 during Weatherford’s residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, New York, were produced by applying shellac ink and raw pigment—including metallic gold, forging a link to the work of Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser—to handmade Gampi Torinoko paper. These are not studies for the paintings, but rather independent works that reflect the richly verdant environs in which they were conceived.

Mary Weatherford received a BA in 1984 from Princeton University, where she took classes in studio art, art history, architecture, and engineering, and an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2006. In her paintings of the 1990s and early 2000s, she incorporated assemblage elements such as seashells, sponges, and starfish within thin washes of Flashe color. These works gave way to the “Vine paintings” (2007–2008), inspired by an intertwined network of ivy, followed by the “Cave paintings” (2010), a series based on Weatherford’s sustained observation, four years earlier, of a sea cave at Pismo Beach, where she produced small pencil drawings and paintings as the sunlight cast different shadows throughout the day. In 2012 Weatherford was a visiting artist at California State University at Bakersfield. As she drove around the small city, she was intrigued by the coloured neon signs of old factories and restaurants, some illuminated, some burned out. “The Bakersfield Project” (2012) grew out of these drives, and it was the first series in which Weatherford incorporated neon rods in her paintings. The rods are screwed directly into the canvas and are connected by thin wires, which create a three-dimensional drawing on top of the painted background and lead down to large magnetic transformers on the floor. Casting an industrial light onto the fields of colour, the neon tubes read as hand-drawn lines across the surface, at times with a blinding brightness that creates lingering afterimages. Weatherford’s use of color and light is based on her direct experience of specific locations, as well as her memories of such experiences. “Manhattan” (2013) and “Los Angeles” (2014), two major series following the “Bakersfield” works, additionally possess references to architectural and infrastructural details. “Brooklyn Bridge” (2013), from the “Manhattan” series, includes two neon rods, in warm yellow and turquoise, held together at their bases by a looped cord that recalls the suspension cables of the famous bridge. “From the mountain to the sea: (2014), from the “Los Angeles” series, attests to Weatherford’s interest not only in the city itself, but also in where the city meets nature, incorporating steely blues and greys with white and yellow lights that oscillate between the organic and the artificial. In her paintings from 2017–2018, Weatherford focuses on her responses to current events, linking them to her experience of premodern narrative pictorial compositions. She thinks of these new works as aspiring to the function of earlier history paintings, which tell of actual or mythological happenings to invoke fundamental and topical concerns.

Photo: Mary Weatherford, Celadon Anemone, 2023, Flashe on linen, 79 × 93 inches (200.7 × 236.2 cm), © Mary Weatherford. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio, Courtesy the artis and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 18/1-2/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/