From July 2 to September 5, 2021, the Long Museum West Bund is pleased to present “Mary Corse: Painting with Light,” the American artist’s first comprehensive solo museum survey in Asia. Comprised of over twenty-five large-scale works, the exhibition highlights major bodies of work from Corse’s expansive six-decade career. It features examples from different series, including the artist’s seminal “White Light” paintings, begun in 1968, examples of her “Black Light” paintings from the 1970s, works from her clay-based “Black Earth” series, “Arch” and “Inner Band” paintings, as well as sculptural pieces including her argon “Light Boxes,” and a monumental free-standing Beam. This exhibition highlights Corse’s ambitious and complex investigations in painting, explores the manifestation of light and its phenomenological experiences, and forges for Corse a unique place in the history of abstraction and twentieth-century art.
Mary Corse emerged amongst a generation of artists in the mid-1960s that were living and working in California. Light became both the subject and object of her art. Exploring notions of subjectivity, perceptual awareness, and the experience of radiant light, Corse’s paintings open themselves up to their environmental surroundings by capturing and refracting light while engaging the viewer in both physical and metaphysical encounters of body and mind. Corse’s artistic practice developed in parallel to many of the artists associated with the Light and Space movement in Los Angeles but remained uniquely distinctive. For half a century, she has committed herself to the medium of painting; investigating the properties of light in a pictorial field that embraces the dualistic qualities of the gestural and the geometric.