MARY CORSE

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 centres 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 these 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.

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 centre 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, each viewer will only be able to see their own halo, a phenomenon that speaks to the personal nature of experiencing Corse’s art.

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 ‘not on the wall,’ but rather in the viewer’s perception.