Mary Corse

Corse’s show at Pace in Los Angeles will feature new paintings and her Halo Room, a new architectural installation that she has been developing over the past few years. Holistically, the exhibition will trace her latest experimentations in painting, shedding light on her radical inquiries into the phenomenological dimensions of art and her role as a key figure in the LA arts community for more than six decades.

A sunset drive along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu in the late 1960s changed the course of her practice. Searching for a way to embed light inside her paintings, Corse investigated the industrial materials in the illuminated road markings along PCH and discovered glass microspheres. Soon after this revelatory event, she began applying these refractive microspheres onto the surfaces of her White Light paintings, endowing her works with a sense of illumination projected from within the picture plane itself that changes with the viewer’s position.

The artist’s presentation at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery will center on her new body of Diamond paintings—a continuation of the first diamond-shaped canvases she made in 1965—and will include several never-before- exhibited works produced this year. With her latest Diamond paintings, Corse delves deeper into the fundamental concepts that have defined her practice from its outset. She expands the scope of her inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of her oeuvre through new iterations of ideas that have long been essential to her work. In addition to Corse’s Diamond paintings, the show will feature one of her iconic, glowing light boxes. Early in her practice, the artist’s efforts to free her artworks from the wall led her to quantum physics, and she subsequently created a series of highly engineered light boxes, which she referred to as “light paintings.” Suspended using monofilaments, the light boxes are powered wirelessly by Tesla coils—high-frequency generators that transmit electromagnetic fields through walls, producing uncanny, spectral effects.

The exhibition will also showcase Corse’s new Halo Room, an architectural installation that debuted in her 2024 presentation at Pace’s New York gallery. This work, which will be installed in the Los Angeles gallery’s outdoor courtyard, offers a participatory, intimate experience of scale, space, and light. When a viewer enters the room, they encounter a white light painting and as they approach the painting the resulting effect produces a glowing halo around the viewer’s shadow, registering their presence but also incorporating it into the painting itself.

This 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, and each viewer will only be able to see their own halo—a phenomenon that speaks to the personal nature of experiencing Corse’s art. The presence and presentness of the viewer within the Halo Room become a pure expression of grace, reflecting the ethos that has animated Corse’s practice for decades: as she puts it, “the art is not on the wall, it’s in your perception.”