Mary Obering Biography

Obering was born in Louisiana and moved into a Soho warehouse in New York City in the 1970s. Making use of her spacious studio, her early experimental works—such as Rio (1977)—comprised colourful tempera rectangles arranged in grid-like columns. Indebted to the language of geometric abstraction, this compositional strategy would come to anchor her practice. Other early paintings, such as The Chinese Place (1975) or Untitled (1974), with their large, rectangular sections of monochromatic hues, recall closely the colour fields of Mark Rothko. Although Rothko died before Obering arrived in New York, her practice was also often impacted by her associations with fellow artists still living in the city, including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Marcia Hafif. In fact, it was Andre who enthusiastically encouraged Obering's work after encountering her paintings in an early exhibition.

In the mid-1970s, Obering began incorporating gold leaf into her works. Having visited Italy as a teenager and been struck by the Renaissance paintings she saw in museums, Obering asked a Soho framer to teach her how to gild. Given gold leaf's historical usage in church altarpieces and its divine associations, Oberling's embrace of the material was unusual at a time when the art world's interest in traditional painting was waning.

In her paintings, Obering carefully distributes swathes of colour in order to balance their compositions. In Temptations (1991), one section of gold is contrasted with three other quadrangles: one recalls the emerald-coloured skin of a ripe lime; another, a shade of peach; and the third, a hazy blonde. Similarly, made the next year, the gold leaf in Winter (1992) is foiled by varying shades of lavender, plum and cream. Writing in 1995, The New York Times' art critic Holland Cotter offered that Obering's use of colour 'suggest[s] close-up outtakes from painting: a rose-red veined with blue that might derive from the Virgin's dress, a cream touched with pink from an angel's wing.'

Before she became a painter, Obering studied psychology, behavioural science and sculpture. She has attributed the 'scientific approach' of her early education as crucial to her practice, while her early studies in sculpture are also evident of an interest in form. The 1985 work Changing of The Charge, for example, combines both influences; the irregularly shaped, gessoed panels are assembled in an angular way that resembles zapping electric currents. In later paintings, such as PA III—PS3 (2003), Obering uses techniques of perspective to angle and section off different colours to create the illusion that the painting is moving outwards or inwards, depending on the observer's point of view.

Obering received a BA in Experimental Psychology from Hollins University (1959), an MA in Behavioural Science from Harvard University and an MFA at the University of Denver (1971).

She currently lives and works in New York City.

Elliat Albrecht and Perwana Nazif | Ocula | 2018