MARY WEATHERFORD

The Japan Drawings brings together select examples from four groups of new works on paper Weatherford produced during a 2019 residency at Troedsson Villa in Nikko, Japan. These drawings emerge from the same kinds of prompts that give rise to the artist’s paintings: each represents a synthesis of abstract material experimentation and response to a particular place, time, experience, or idea. While their gestural brushwork and complex spatial effects offer clear parallels to her neon paintings, for instance, more subtle connections also abound, providing viewers with fresh points of access to the prevailing dualities—between heaven and earth, individual encounter and collective imagination, cultural history and direct sense perception— that have fuelled Weatherford’s project for more than 30 years.

Concurrent with The Japan Drawings, One-on-One: Mary Weatherford, Into Space and Time, a presentation dedicated to the artist’s newest neon painting, will also be on view at the gallery’s Online Viewing Room. One-on-One: Mary Weatherford, Into Space and Time opens on Tuesday, April 21, 8:00 am Pacific Time and will be on view through April 28, 2020.

Mary Weatherford is currently the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Canyon–Daisy–Eden, that opened in February 2020 at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, and will travel to SITE Santa Fe. Other solo exhibitions include shows at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California (2014); Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University at Bakersfield, California (2012); and LAXART, Los Angeles (2012). Recent group exhibitions include Aftereffect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2019); Feel the Sun in Your Mouth: Recent Acquisitions, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2019); Between Two Worlds: Art of California, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2015); Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (2015); and The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014). In 2019, Lund Humphries published an in-depth monograph surveying the artist’s oeuvre. Weatherford lives and works in Los Angeles.