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34 works expanded our vision of light in Korea for the first time
Seoul, South Korea, November 2, 2021/PRNewswire/ - Amore Pacific Art Museum (hereinafter referred to as APMA) will launch the first comprehensive personal museum survey of American artists in South Korea from November 2 to February 20. " Mary Corsis: Painting of Light", 2022.
For the past six years, Corse's work has been studying perception, the properties of light, and abstract ideas. This exhibition is composed of 34 monumental works selected from Corse's extensive career. It highlights her ambitious and complex painting research, explores the expression of light and its phenomenological experience, and provides Corse's expertise in abstraction and 20th century art. Created a unique position in history. Featured works come from multiple series, including the artist’s groundbreaking white light paintings starting in 1968, black light paintings from the 1970s, her clay-based black clay series, arches and inner band paintings, as well as sculptures including her argon Light boxes and a huge independent beam.
"I want to thank the Amorepacific Art Museum for hosting my first museum exhibition in Korea. I am honored to have this privilege and I hope we can experience the similarities in our common humanity in such a remote place. ," Coase said. The exhibition reveals a deep insight into the artist's practice and a continuous dialogue with perceptual consciousness. The works embody rather than just represent light, and invite the audience to experience them in innovative ways. Together, they open their hearts to the surrounding environment and create an experiential encounter based on vision and movement for the audience. APMA sincerely hopes that this exhibition will provide new opportunities to expand and surpass people's perceptions of light. For the safety of visitors, all participants need to make advance reservations through APMA's official website (https://apma.amorepacific.com).
*Exhibition room 1 starts with Mary Corse's pioneering white light painting series. In 1968, she developed a radical painting technique that combined layered glass microspheres with acrylic paint. This industrial material is used to optimize the visibility of road markings on interstate highways, which she first noticed while driving on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Spreading these tiny glass particles in a thin layer on her surface, Corse developed an aesthetic that utilizes the refractive index of light. When light interacts with Corse's paintings, it oscillates and reacts to our position and movements as viewers. The brightness of her work exposes the physical brushstrokes that appear and disappear, as well as the surface touch that flickers and glows but then becomes flat. The other two works-"Inner Band" series and "Untitled (Beam)" (2020)-continue the pedigree of white light painting.
* Exhibition Hall 2 introduces the painted series and arched paintings. In the late 1990s, after focusing on monochrome black or white painting, Corse began to create works that blended primary colors (red, yellow, and blue). By layering the tones with glass microspheres, the artist found that she could avoid "just drawing a picture of a color", but "let the color become light". Interested in the fact that all colors exist in white light, she tried to "deep into white light" through these paintings, showing pure and saturated colors. As a product of white light, the use of primary colors and glass microspheres extended her long-term research to the properties of light and human perception. In her Arch paintings, Corse transforms into a more structured form, reminiscent of architectural columns and door lintels. Starting with a single arch in black or white, these paintings contain a shortened band so that the outer edges meet at the top. This theme often appears like a door or acts as a portal, bringing Corse's work closer to representative images than ever before, and therefore more clearly related to the human body and the space in which it lives. These works play a role in physics, phenomena and expressive spaces, creating a push-pull effect that seems to draw the viewer's attention to the surface of the canvas.
The monochromatic special-shaped canvas paintings she created during the Joynard School of Art in Los Angeles (1964-68) are exhibited in *Exhibition Room 3. She goes beyond the traditional rectangular format that she has been exploring in abstraction. Her special-shaped canvas works are in the form of octagonal, hexagonal and rhombus, and are composed of large monochromatic areas with white borders. Octagonal Blue (1964) shows the introduction of trace element mica fragments in an attempt to capture light in her paintings.
* Exhibition room 4 displays her light painting work "Untitled (Electric Light)" (2021). When she first produced these works in the late 1960s, the light box represented Corse's most consistent pursuit of "objective truth." The light box achieves this ultimate goal by using light itself as a medium, and forcing her to find a way to "put light into the painting". Her research in physics helped her create these works, which made her understand that such pursuits are futile. The revelation that human experience is inherently subjective allows her to reintroduce subjectivity into her work by returning to painting and reintroducing brushwork. Corse's experience with light boxes also prompted her to find a way to make her paintings produce light, rather than merely expressing or suggesting it.
* Exhibition room 5 transitions to her black light series. Corse's pursuit of light is not limited to its emission and reflection characteristics. By the early 1970s, she introduced black paint mixed with acrylic cubes into her practice. Extending her exploration of materials, the black light painting uses both acrylic squares and glass microspheres to reflect and refract light, while being absorbed by dark pigments, resulting in a shiny black surface. The cosmic effects of the Black Light series reveal Corse's interest in the oscillation of light conditions, taking the historical essence of light and darkness as concepts and concepts of distance (such as stars in the night sky), subtlety and gradual changes. Light. Corse once said, "I try to bring our current reality into reality."
Corse's experiments with black surfaces continued until *Exhibition Room 6. In the early 1970s, Mary Corse moved from Los Angeles to Topanga Canyon (Topanga Canyon), a remote west of Los Angeles. She began to make ceramic works to explore what she thought was the opposite of ethereal white light painting. Has been creating since 1968. Her works on clay (earth) try to "ground" her paintings and connect them with the material world. She started the black soil series by shooting a plaster impression of a large, flat rock on the mountain near her home. After the plaster molds are made, they are transferred to clay, and then converted into fired tiles with a glossy black glaze in the artist's custom-made rising wind kiln. These works are assembled in a grid form and installed on the wall to create a black earth series.
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Mary Corse (born 1945, Berkeley, California) has continued to study abstraction, materiality, and perception through clever gestures and precise geometric paintings made during her 6-year career. Among the generation of artists who lived and worked in California in the mid-1960s, light became the subject and object of her art. During her studies at the Chouinard School of Art in the late 1960s, she began to experiment with unconventional media and support, making special-shaped canvases, using plexiglass works and light-emitting boxes. Between 1966 and 1968, her interest in the relationship between light and perception led her to experiment with argon light boxes powered by Tesla coils. Her works developed at the same time, but they are different from the artists related to the Los Angeles Light and Space Movement, and she is often compared with them. Unlike those artists, Corse's experiment with electric lights finally allowed her to re-add visible brushstrokes to her paintings, which was a subjective gesture she had previously deleted. In the 1990s, Corse reintroduced primary colors into her paintings based on her understanding that colors are composed of white light. She continues to explore the concepts of subjectivity, perceptual awareness and radiant light experience. Her paintings capture and refract light while allowing the audience to participate in the physical and metaphysical encounter of body and mind, thereby opening up to the surrounding environment. Corse's innovative treatment of materials that capture and refract light ensures that our perception of her paintings changes as the light changes or we move in space. Corse enables the inherent abstraction of human perception to be felt, not just to be seen.
Corse has held several solo exhibitions, including a display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019, the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018, and Dia: Beacon in 2018. Corse's work is in the permanent collection of the new Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dia Art Foundation, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Shanghai Long Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and many more.
SOURCE Amorepacific Art Museum
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