Lehmann Maupin Gallery is pleased to present Mary Corse’s inaugural exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled New Work, on view 2 February – 10 March 2012, at 540 West 26th Street.

Having first gained recognition in the 1960s Southern California art scene, working alongside the generation of ‘Light and Space’ artists, Mary Corse continues to be a prominent and influential figure today. Corse is best known for her exploration of radiant and interactive surfaces and her innovative technique of painting. For her inaugural exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, Mary Corse will exhibit five new paintings. In Corse’s work, three outstanding themes are most conspicuous: perception, time, and inner dimensions.

Because Mary Corse’s works change before our eyes with the slightest shift in viewing position or ambient light, in situ they have no fixed objective appearance independent of a dynamic individual perception. The works therefore do not depict perception, but reveal the nature and operation of the perceptive act in progress. They enact rather than represent our experience of reality. Since this dynamic quality reveals itself in time as the light changes or as one traverses the field of view, the work also poses a temporal dynamic wholly contrived by the artist. A vision of adjacent works in the gallery space compounds this effect. Since, traditionally, paintings are “frozen” with respect to time while real time never stops, this dynamic addresses the nature of realism in a more fundamental way. Even though the artist employs a two-dimensional surface, one’s changing perception of that surface constantly yields multiple inner dimensions in dynamic tension with each other. Since these tensions most often may be grouped under the general categories of Minimalist flatness, and painterly abstraction, the works implicitly subsume and transcend two earlier art historical epochs, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. The works’ integration of these three themes both expresses and renders tangible the perceptive faculty.

Born in Berkeley, CA in 1945, Mary Corse received her B.F.A. from the University of California in 1963, and her M.F.A. from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1968. Corse’s work has been exhibited in several important and international exhibitions this year including Venice in Venice, a collateral exhibition curated by Nyehaus in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2011); Phenomenal: California Light and Space, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (2011); Surface, Support, Process: The 1960s Monochrome in the Guggenheim Collection, at the Guggenheim Museum, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2012). Her works are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA, Los Angeles); the Fondation Beyeler (Basel), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), The Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego); the Guggenheim Museum (New York), and other institutions public and private. Mary Corse lives and works in Los Angeles.