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拍品專文
Mary Corse’s shimmering Untitled (DNA Series) is a masterful example of the artist’s oeuvre that brilliantly investigates materiality, abstraction, and the perception of light through geometric and gestural painting. Stretching nearly twenty feet in width, the alternating bands of white and black flicker and dazzle as they reflect, refract and generate light. Interactive and radiant, the luminous work was created with Corse’s innovative painting technique of blending reflective glass microspheres into acrylic paint. When applied to the canvas, the surface has a prismatic effect of embodying rather than merely representing light. As a pioneer of light-based art, Corse opens this monumental abstract canvas up to the environment so that it captures and produces a field of light that extends into three-dimensional space. For Corse, the viewer’s experience is fundamental to the work; Untitled (DNA Series) invites perceptional encounters and subjective experiences based on one’s vision and movement around the painting. Corse refers to this black-and-white painting as the “DNA” of the series, and each subsequent work in the series is a progeny of this original monumental painting in form and color. The equally spaced, repeating black-and-white fields demonstrate Corse’s extensive artistic practice of exploring perception, light, and space.
Throughout her highly-acclaimed five decade career, Corse became renowned for her Minimalist monochromatic paintings that simultaneously explore abstraction, human perception, and materiality. Formally trained as an abstract painter at the Chouinard Art Institute in 1964, she first gained recognition in the mid-1960s as one of several women artists associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement in Southern California, whose members included James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Douglas Wheeler and Larry Bell. Corse shared the artists’ deep fascination with the perception and the medium of light, as well as with employing reflective and transparent surfaces in art making. Moreover, she was captivated by the possibility that light itself could serve as both subject and material of art. While the movement’s artists abandoned painting for sculptural and environmental light projects, Corse approached light through the tradition of painting, setting her apart from her male counterparts. As many saw painting too restrictive, Corse pushed the category’s bounds, expanding it beyond the flat canvas with her use of glistening microspheres. From the outset of her career, Corse left the spontaneous Abstract Expressionist style of painting behind to experiment with large-scale paintings, created with a controlled application of pigment and the geometry of Minimalism. Using sparkling microspheres and geometric form in painting, Corse skillfully explores how light is dispersed in the pictorial spaces it occupies.
Corse’s evolving practice has pursued the same major themes through various projects – to explore the boundaries of painting, properties of light, and our subjective experience of perceiving light through new materials and structures. Believing that “the essence of painting is not about the paint” but in the “flatness, the light, and space” of the work, her career became a complex investigation into a range of alternative painting materials, ranging from fluorescent light and Plexiglass constructions illuminated with electric lights, to metallic flakes, shaped canvases, and shimmering glazed ceramic works (M. Corse quoted in K. Conaty, Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, New York, 2018, p. 19). In 1968, Corse discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material of tiny prismatic glass beads often embedded into white dividing lines on highways for their reflective properties. She developed an innovative painting technique of blending these iridescent beads into her acrylic paint, so that her painting surfaces radiate light from within. In Corse’s geometric configurations, such as Untitled (DNA Series), she gives structure to the luminescent internal space of the painting. As the work reflects and refracts light, the microspheric surface incessantly shifts according to the painting’s surroundings, changing light conditions, and viewer’s position in relation to the artwork.
In Corse’s most recent series of monumental canvases, of which Untitled (DNA Series) is paramount, the artist experiments with the concept of subjective phenomenological experience in new and innovative ways. For Corse, it is the complex spatial and temporal interaction of the painting and viewer that activates the work. She explains: “For me painting has never been about the paint, but what the painting does. I didn’t want to make a picture of light; I wanted to put the actual light in the painting so I searched for materials that would do this. I wanted to make a painting that would depend on the viewer’s perception, so I used this medium [microspheres] to create change in relation to the viewer’s position.” She elaborates, “With my work, which changes as you walk around it, what one person sees from one side is different from what another person sees from the other. The art is not on the wall, it’s in the viewer’s perception” (M. Corse quoted in K.G. Corcoran, Mary Corse, New York and London, 2017, p. 148, 157). As the viewer moves in the space before the painting, the prismatic quality of the microspheres creates an illuminating effect. It captures and reflects light, simultaneously darkening and brightening the oscillating vertical stripes of black and white. The shifting light exposes the artist’s tactile brushstrokes and the raised glittering texture of the microspheres, or flattens it to create an appearance of a uniform canvas surface. This glistening work epitomizes Corse’s focus on the human perception of color being a highly individual and subjective experience.
Untitled (DNA Series) imbues the Minimalist framework of geometry and seriality with gesture and chance. Although the composition of the painting is of Minimalist style, Corse’s hand is visible in the brushwork and gestures on the canvas surface, adding to the depth and complexity this work. In this way, the Minimalist aesthetic, practiced by her venerable peers Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Daniel Buren, is furthered by Corse. She gracefully transforms the opaque and blank Minimalist canvases into surfaces where the hard-edged stripes of white and black, as well as the gestural brushstrokes, appear and disappear. Exceptionally rendered, Untitled (DNA Series) illustrates Corse’s engagement with the tropes of Modernist painting, from the monochrome to the grid, revealing her deep knowledge of both human perception and studies of quantum physics and light.
Throughout her highly-acclaimed five decade career, Corse became renowned for her Minimalist monochromatic paintings that simultaneously explore abstraction, human perception, and materiality. Formally trained as an abstract painter at the Chouinard Art Institute in 1964, she first gained recognition in the mid-1960s as one of several women artists associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement in Southern California, whose members included James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Douglas Wheeler and Larry Bell. Corse shared the artists’ deep fascination with the perception and the medium of light, as well as with employing reflective and transparent surfaces in art making. Moreover, she was captivated by the possibility that light itself could serve as both subject and material of art. While the movement’s artists abandoned painting for sculptural and environmental light projects, Corse approached light through the tradition of painting, setting her apart from her male counterparts. As many saw painting too restrictive, Corse pushed the category’s bounds, expanding it beyond the flat canvas with her use of glistening microspheres. From the outset of her career, Corse left the spontaneous Abstract Expressionist style of painting behind to experiment with large-scale paintings, created with a controlled application of pigment and the geometry of Minimalism. Using sparkling microspheres and geometric form in painting, Corse skillfully explores how light is dispersed in the pictorial spaces it occupies.
Corse’s evolving practice has pursued the same major themes through various projects – to explore the boundaries of painting, properties of light, and our subjective experience of perceiving light through new materials and structures. Believing that “the essence of painting is not about the paint” but in the “flatness, the light, and space” of the work, her career became a complex investigation into a range of alternative painting materials, ranging from fluorescent light and Plexiglass constructions illuminated with electric lights, to metallic flakes, shaped canvases, and shimmering glazed ceramic works (M. Corse quoted in K. Conaty, Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, New York, 2018, p. 19). In 1968, Corse discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material of tiny prismatic glass beads often embedded into white dividing lines on highways for their reflective properties. She developed an innovative painting technique of blending these iridescent beads into her acrylic paint, so that her painting surfaces radiate light from within. In Corse’s geometric configurations, such as Untitled (DNA Series), she gives structure to the luminescent internal space of the painting. As the work reflects and refracts light, the microspheric surface incessantly shifts according to the painting’s surroundings, changing light conditions, and viewer’s position in relation to the artwork.
In Corse’s most recent series of monumental canvases, of which Untitled (DNA Series) is paramount, the artist experiments with the concept of subjective phenomenological experience in new and innovative ways. For Corse, it is the complex spatial and temporal interaction of the painting and viewer that activates the work. She explains: “For me painting has never been about the paint, but what the painting does. I didn’t want to make a picture of light; I wanted to put the actual light in the painting so I searched for materials that would do this. I wanted to make a painting that would depend on the viewer’s perception, so I used this medium [microspheres] to create change in relation to the viewer’s position.” She elaborates, “With my work, which changes as you walk around it, what one person sees from one side is different from what another person sees from the other. The art is not on the wall, it’s in the viewer’s perception” (M. Corse quoted in K.G. Corcoran, Mary Corse, New York and London, 2017, p. 148, 157). As the viewer moves in the space before the painting, the prismatic quality of the microspheres creates an illuminating effect. It captures and reflects light, simultaneously darkening and brightening the oscillating vertical stripes of black and white. The shifting light exposes the artist’s tactile brushstrokes and the raised glittering texture of the microspheres, or flattens it to create an appearance of a uniform canvas surface. This glistening work epitomizes Corse’s focus on the human perception of color being a highly individual and subjective experience.
Untitled (DNA Series) imbues the Minimalist framework of geometry and seriality with gesture and chance. Although the composition of the painting is of Minimalist style, Corse’s hand is visible in the brushwork and gestures on the canvas surface, adding to the depth and complexity this work. In this way, the Minimalist aesthetic, practiced by her venerable peers Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Daniel Buren, is furthered by Corse. She gracefully transforms the opaque and blank Minimalist canvases into surfaces where the hard-edged stripes of white and black, as well as the gestural brushstrokes, appear and disappear. Exceptionally rendered, Untitled (DNA Series) illustrates Corse’s engagement with the tropes of Modernist painting, from the monochrome to the grid, revealing her deep knowledge of both human perception and studies of quantum physics and light.