Mary Corse
Then & Now
September 16–November 11, 2017
Opening: Saturday, September 16, 6–8pm
Kayne Griffin Corcoran
1201 South La Brea Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present Then and Now, a career-spanning exhibition of works by Mary Corse. This will be Corse’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
For the last five decades, Mary Corse has radically explored perception, properties of light, and ideas of abstraction in her practice. Then and Now brings together multiple bodies of work from this groundbreaking half-century engagement with subjectivity.
Central to the exhibition will be The Cold Room (1968/2017), an immersive installation that Corse originally conceived during her exploration of light works from 1966–68. Nearly 50 years later, The Cold Room will be realized for the first time at Kayne Griffin Corcoran. The installation consists of a suspended light box inside a freestanding structure chilled near to the freezing point, heightening the perceptual experience for the viewers within.
Surrounding The Cold Room in the Main Gallery will be five monumental paintings created between the late 1990s and early 2000s, each relating to Corse’s signature “white inner band” motif. The South Gallery will feature selections from her new body of paintings, the “DNA Series,” in which the artist returns
to the black acrylic squares she first used in the early 1970s. In total, the exhibition provides a thorough look at the innovative works and expansive practice of Mary Corse.
Mary Corse was born in Berkeley in 1945 and earned her MFA from Chouinard Art Institute in 1968. She has shown extensively in the US and abroad in the decades since, including such historically significant exhibitions as Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and later traveling to the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Venice in Venice, an official collateral exhibition of the 54th Venice Biennale.
Corse’s works reside in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the J. Paul Getty Museum; and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, among many others. She is a past recipient of the Guggenheim’s Theodoron Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Cartier Foundation Award. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Mary Corse’s primary representation is Kayne Griffin Corcoran.
