Mary Corse (b. 1945) has been recognized as one of the few women associated with the 1960s Light and Space movement in Southern California. For nearly six decades, Corse has explored abstraction, materiality, and perception through subtly gestural and precisely geometric works that prompt physical and metaphysical experiences of light. She is most known today for her White Light paintings at the nexus of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.
Throughout the 1960s, Corse experimented with unconventional mediums including works with plexiglass and illuminated boxes. Fascinated with the idea that light could serve as both a subject and object of art, Mary engineered freestanding sculptures and light encasements aiming to create “pure” experiences of light, unmediated by human subjectivity. In order to create custom generators with tesla coils for her light boxes, Corse enrolled in an engineering class at USC, where she first encountered quantum physics and the nonexistence of objectivity. “Nothing’s static in the universe. So why make a static painting?” says the artist.
In 1968, Corse began creating paintings with glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways. Prompted by her studies of quantum physics, she was searching for a way to put light into her paintings. Driving on the Pacific Coast Highway at night, she was captivated by the changing luminosity of this material. Her White Light paintings are embedded with these refractive beads, producing shifts in appearance based on the viewer’s position and environment. Often monumental in size, these paintings feature subtle traces of Corses’s brushstrokes while appearing to radiate light from within. These compositions consist of precisely proportioned grids, stripes, and bands, exploring the subtleties of the abstract nature of human perception. “The painting is a tool to activate perception, rather than a discrete, autonomous object,” said art historian Alex Bacon in conversation with the artist.
In the 1970s, Corse began other series including her Black Light paintings, and later her Black Earth works made of large ceramic slabs molded from impressions of the surface of mountains. However Mary soon returned to her White Light paintings, working monochromatically for thirty years before reintroducing primary colors. “It is not surprising that [Corse] has been creating the White Light paintings for decades,” wrote art historian Adam Weinberg. “Each painting is a way station of renewed, evolutionary exploration not a destination.”
In 2018, Mary Corse: A Survey in Light was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and in 2019 traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is found in permanent collections including the Dia Art Foundation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Corse lives and works in Topanga Canyon, where she moved from downtown Los Angeles in 1970. Her work will be presented for the first time in Philadelphia with her solo exhibition at Locks Gallery opening April 2025.
