Locks Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with California-based artist Mary Corse (b. 1945). This presentation will feature a selection of recent ethereal White Light paintings, a body of work she has been making since 1968.
Mary Corse is one of the few women associated with the 1960s Light and Space movement in Southern California. Her luminous White Light paintings are made of glass microspheres, an industrial material which refracts light and shifts in appearance according to the viewer’s position and environment. Prompted by her studies of quantum physics in the late 1960s, Corse 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 the street signs and highway lines. She began combining these tiny glass beads with acrylic paint to create the illusion of light as both the subject and material of her work.
Each of Corse’s paintings is composed of geometries with precise proportions, prompting specific physical and metaphysical experiences of light. The surface of her paintings are rarely pristine; visible brushstrokes reflect the physical labor and systemic application behind each painting. Some works feature vertical bands, activating the verticality of the viewer’s stance. The luminosity of each band shifts in appearance through space, activating a subjective experience of light. Stripes seem to appear and disappear. At times, the surface appears flat while at others, it emits an ethereal light, seemingly radiating from within the canvas. “Nothing’s static in the universe. So why make a static painting?” says Corse. “It’s an outer light, but when you relate to it, it becomes an inner light,” says the artist.
With over five decades of experimentation with her White Light paintings, Corse proves her unrivaled exploration into the abstract nature of human perception. In her paintings, materiality and light is both absent and present, visible and invisible. As put by Art historian Drew Hammond, Corse’s paintings “reveal innumerable oscillating variations between these two poles of unity and multiplicity.”
This inaugural exhibition celebrates Corse’s dedicated exploration of light in her subtle and powerful paintings. Her ongoing and evolving White Light paintings challenge world views based on external fixity and objectivity, honoring the power of subjective individual experiences, embodied perception, and change.
Mary Corse (b. 1945) lives and works in Topanga Canyon, California. 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.
