Mary Corse

A California native, Corse has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1964. Over the course of her distinguished career, she has investigated the perceptual and spatial properties of light through abstract works that combine aesthetic refinement with scientific rigor. Employing an empirical and materially attentive approach in her practice, she explores the ways in which light can operate simultaneously as both subject and material within the pictorial field.

Corse discovered glass microspheres—an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on roadways—in 1968, after incorporating various reflective substances, including silver flakes and Murano glass paint, into her compositions. Applied to the surfaces of her works with acrylic paint, these tiny glass beads create a shifting, illuminative effect, responding to their surrounding environment and creating “a triangle between the surface, the viewer, and the light.”

Though Corse’s first diamond-shaped paintings were rendered in all white, her new works incorporate inner bands that bifurcate the compositions in vibrant red, yellow, and blue hues. The introduction of primary colors into her oeuvre, like the microspheres, grew from her enduring interest in the phenomenological possibilities of art.

“Going deeper into white light, you’re going to find color,” Corse has said. “I always liked moving deeper inward." She has also stated that she is “interested in a painting that is about itself. . . just a pure perceptual experience of the moment, the experience before the idea.”

In addition to new Diamond paintings, Pace’s presentation will include the artist’s light box work Untitled (Electric Light) from 2021. Like her shaped canvases, Corse came to the light box form—or “light painting,” as she calls it—early in her career as a means of rethinking and reimagining the possibilities of painting. Inspired by quantum physics, this austere, glowing installation consists of a three-dimensional Plexiglas square, suspended by monofilaments and powered wirelessly by Tesla coils—high-frequency generators that transmit electromagnetic fields. Emitting a radiant white light, this work serves as an anchor in the exhibition, an otherworldly presence within a constellation of canvases.

In 2021, Corse was the subject of a major one-artist exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai, which traveled to the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul in 2022. Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, the artist’s first one-artist museum survey, was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Comprehensive catalogs were published with both surveys. A focused presentation of Corse’s work was on view at Dia: Beacon in New York for four years, highlighting historical works from the collection.

In 2025, Corse’s work was included in the exhibition Minimal at the Borse de Commerce in Paris. In 2023, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented Light, Space, Surface, in which Corse’s work was exhibited. She was also included in Long Story Short at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023–2024), as well as the major presentation Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A., Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2011.

The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul; The Art Institute of Chicago; Dia Art Foundation, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other institutions.