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Mary Corse

Past
Feb 4 – Feb 21, 2021
Palm Beach

Together, the sculpture and paintings on view—created specifically for this exhibition and designed to be experienced in unison—lend deep insight into Mary Corse's practice and ongoing dialogue with perceptual awareness.

Exhibition Details

Mary Corse
Feb 4 – 21, 2021

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Gallery

340 Royal Poinciana Way
Suite M333
Palm Beach

Above: Installation view, Mary Corse, February 4 – 21, 2021, Pace Gallery, Palm Beach © Mary Corse

Pace Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of five new works by Mary Corse at the gallery’s seasonal location in Palm Beach, Florida. Over the last five decades, Corse’s work has continuously investigated perception, properties of light, and ideas of abstraction. This presentation features four paintings as well as a sculpture from the artist’s Untitled (Beam) series, and marks Corse’s first exhibition in Southern Florida in two decades.

Since the 1960s, Corse’s pioneering approach to painting has explored the medium’s capacity to utilize and refract light through subtly gestural and precisely geometric works. For the artist, the essence of painting addresses underlying structures of visual experience and their presence within space and time. Corse often emphasizes that her paintings are “not on the wall,” but instead suspended in a visual relationship between viewer and canvas. Corse has pursued this interest in perception since the late 1960s by incorporating glass microspheres into the surfaces of her paintings, which appear to radiate light from within. The microspheres—an industrial material used to enhance the visibility of road markings—capture and refract light depending on the viewer’s position relative to the work’s optically rich surface.

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Mary Corse, Untitled (Inner Band with White Sides), 2020, glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas. 50" × 50" × 4" (127 cm × 127 cm × 10.2 cm) © Mary Corse

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Mary Corse, Untitled (Multiband and White), 2020, glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas. 50" × 50" × 4" (127 cm × 127 cm × 10.2 cm) © Mary Corse

Together, the sculpture and paintings on view—created specifically for this exhibition and designed to be experienced in unison—lend deep insight into the artist’s practice and ongoing dialogue with perceptual awareness. The works embody rather than merely represent light, and invite viewers to experience them in innovative ways. Collectively they open themselves up to their environment and create a transcendental experiential encounter for viewers that is grounded in vision and movement.

This exhibition builds on Corse’s presence in the Palm Beach area—the artist is included in the Norton Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

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Mary Corse

Mary Corse investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her fifty-year career.

Earning a BFA in 1968 from Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, Corse developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California. Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. In 1968, Corse discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways. Combining these tiny refractive beads with acrylic paint, she creates paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. Corse’s art emphasizes the abstract nature of human perception, expanding beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.

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