For the astrophile, it is a source of perpetual frustration that the moon looks like shit on an iPhone. For the moon, it is a source of power. The whitish stripes in Mary Corse’s minimal paintings, twelve of which comprise her second show at Lehmann Maupin, exert a similar pull: There is no one angle from which you can fix in your perception the experience of looking at a canvas and feeling it change. One moment the stripe is blank; in another moment it’s mark-ridden, dirty; in another still it’s almost silver. This whitish magic, achieved by mixing acrylic paint with the shiny glass beads used in highway signs, has been Corse’s signature effect since 1968.

Corse shares the rigor and compositional wit of Ellsworth Kelly and the rough grace of Agnes Martin, but she has the name recognition of neither. Though she was born in Berkeley, lives in Los Angeles, and is adjacent to the Light and Space movement, she hates being called a “California painter.” Yet it’s hard to think of another classification as right. In her new paintings, the non-whitish stripes are the colors of newer cars: black, sun yellow, glittering ruby, or blue. The show is like a tightly controlled cruise through an alien landscape, albeit one that should be a little more familiar.

— Sarah Nicole Prickett