Mary Corse: Presence in Light
Mary Corse: Presence in Light 540 W 25th Street, New York, NY September 13 – October 26 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Mary Corse at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Which opened on September 13th and will be on view until October 26, this presentation marks Corse’s first solo show in the city since 2019 and follows several recent institutional exhibitions by the artist at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, as well as her 2018 traveling retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Corse’s upcoming exhibition at Pace will coincide with her participation in Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945–1990—a group exhibition organized as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative—at the Palm Springs Art Museum in California.
Untitled (Yellow Diamond with White Inner Band)2024 PAINTING glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas 92" × 92" × 4" (233.7 cm × 233.7 cm × 10.2 cm) No. 92698
Over the course of her six-decade career, Corse has explored phenomena of light, space, and perception in sublime and boundary-crossing abstractions across mediums. A key member of the Los Angeles artist community from the 1960s to the present, she is often associated with the Light and Space movement but has always been committed to the possibilities of painting, which remains her primary concern. As part of her empirical and highly tactile approach to art making, Corse has continually investigated the ways in which light can be both subject and material. In the late 1960s, while searching for a way to embed light inside her paintings, Corse experienced an epiphany. Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu at sunset, she noticed the road markings were progressively illuminated by headlights as she drove along. Investigating the industrial applications that make this effect possible, she discovered glass microspheres—a material used to enhance visibility of road signage. In 1968, Corse began applying these refractive microspheres onto the surfaces of her White Light paintings, endowing these works with a sense of illumination projected from within the picture plane itself.
The body of work that Corse will debut in her presentation at Pace in New York this fall centers on a new series of diamond-shaped paintings, which continue her longstanding practice of incorporating glass microspheres into the painted surface. Corse has experimented with the physical structure of her canvases since her time as a student at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles between 1964 and 1968. Although she created her first diamond-shaped paintings while still in her 20s, this body of work marks the first diamond-shaped canvases she has made since the 1960s. Corse’s return to the format of the diamond underscores one of the hallmarks of her practice: an interest in recursion and return to early ideas. With her new Diamond paintings, the artist delves ever deeper into the fundamental concepts that animated her practice at its outset. She expands the scope of her inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of her oeuvre through these new iterations of ideas that have long been essential to the work.
Untitled (Blue Diamond with Black Inner Band), 2024 PAINTING glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas 92" × 92" × 4" (233.7 cm × 233.7 cm × 10.2 cm) No. 92671 © Mary Corse, courtesy Pace Gallery
The works in the presentation at Pace, all of which have never before been exhibited, will include Corse’s Halo Room, a new architectural installation that she has been developing over the last several years. This work, which will be installed in the center of the gallery space but can also be placed outdoors, offers a participatory, intimate experience of scale, space, and light. When a viewer enters the room, a single interior light projects their shadow onto a White Light painting. The resulting effect produces a glowing halo around the viewer’s shadow, registering their presence but also incorporating it into the painting itself. The installation hinges on the energetic relationship between individual and object, producing a moment of intersubjective collision that facilitates a spiritual manifestation of bodies within space. Up to two participants will be allowed inside the installation at a time, and each viewer will only be able to see their own halo—a phenomenon that speaks to the personal nature of experiencing Corse’s art.
The Halo Room 2023-2024 SCULPTURE glass microspheres in acrylic on powder coated aluminum, glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas, light 9' × 10' × 11' (274.3 cm × 304.8 cm × 335.3 cm) No.92448 © Mary Corse, courtesy Pace Gallery
Corse’s Halo Room continues and deepens a long tradition of grappling with questions of presence in post-1960s art. In his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” the critic Michael Fried famously condemned Minimal aesthetics for their perceived “theatricality.” Fried contrasted this with an all-over painting, in which the entire composition could be perceived by the viewer all at once, in a single instant. Fried called this quality “presentness,” and in the essay, he famously declared: “Presentness is grace.” Although not a minimalist, Corse is associated with many of the post- 1960s practices to which Fried was referring, having shown with Dick Bellamy’s Green Gallery in New York in the late 1960s. Her new work is equally concerned with questions of presence and presentness. The Halo Room serves as a counterpoint to Fried’s argument, in which the presence and presentness of the viewer within the work itself—both literally and pictorially—becomes a pure expression of grace, a reflection of the ethos that has animated Corse’s practice for decades: the work of art is, as she puts it, “not on the wall, it’s in your perception.”
Untitled (White Diamond with Black Inner Band)2024 PAINTING glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas 110-3/8" × 110-3/8" × 3-3/4" (280.4 cm × 280.4 cm × 9.5 cm) No. 92442 © Mary Corse, courtesy Pace Gallery
Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, California) investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her sixty-year career. Earning a BFA in 1968 from Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, Corse developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California. Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. In 1968, Corse discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways. Combining these tiny refractive beads with acrylic paint, she began to create paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. She first developed her White Light paintings, and by the 70s she transitioned to making her Black Light series with black acrylic and microspheres. The Black Earth works followed: large ceramic slabs that she fired in a custom-built kiln and glazed black. After thirty years of working monochromatically, she reintroduced primary colors into her paintings based on her understanding of color as constitutive of white light. Corse’s art emphasizes the abstract nature of human perception, expanding beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.
Untitled (Black Diamond with Black Inner Band), 2023 PAINTING glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas 70-3/4" × 70-3/4" × 4-1/2" (179.7 cm × 179.7 cm × 11.4 cm) No. 90272 © Mary Corse, courtesy Pace Gallery
In 2021, Corse was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai which traveled to the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul in 2022. Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, the artist’s first solo museum survey, was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Comprehensive catalogs were published with both surveys. A focused presentation of Corse’s work was on view at Dia: Beacon in New York for four years highlighting historical works from the collection.
Untitled (White Diamond with White Inner Band)2024 PAINTING glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas 110-1/2" × 110-1/2" × 3-3/4" (280.7 cm × 280.7 cm × 9.5 cm) No. 92441 © Mary Corse, courtesy Pace Gallery
Corse was also included in the major presentation Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A., Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2011. In 2023, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented Light, Space, Surface, in which Corse’s work was exhibited. She was also included in Long Story Short at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023–2024). In 2024, Corse is participating in Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945–1990—a group exhibition organized as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative—at the Palm Springs Art Museum in California. The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Amorepacfic Museum of Art, Seoul; Dia Art Foundation, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other institutions.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
Photography courtesy Pace Gallery. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
