HONG KONG.- Pace is presenting the first exhibition in Asia dedicated to renowned artist Mary Corse. Over the last five decades, Corse’s practice has investigated perception, properties of light and ideas of abstraction—all through an innovative approach to the medium of painting, in which light serves as both the subject and object of art. For Corse’s first exhibition in Asia, Pace is exhibiting a selection of eight new paintings by the artist, which continue her use of glass microspheres and a limited palette of white, black, and red acrylic paint to create simple geometric configurations, giving structure to the luminescent internal space of her works. The exhibition is on view at Pace’s gallery in the H Queen’s building March 26 – May 11, 2019.

Corse’s paintings embody rather than merely represent light, and explore subjective experience in innovative ways. Her works open themselves up to their environment, refracting light, and invite a perceptual encounter that is grounded in vision and movement. The new paintings on view in this exhibition are a continuation of Corse’s White Light paintings, which she began in 1968 and has evolved over the last 50 years. She started to create the paintings after noticing how the white lines on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway lit up when struck by headlights—a phenomenon caused by glass microspheres imbedded in the paint, as well as by her physical movement, with the experience of the highway illumination being tied to her perception of light seen while in motion. Translating this discovery to her own practice, Corse combined tiny glass microspheres with acrylic paint and harnessed the refraction of light, creating the appearance of a radiating light that shifts based on the viewer’s position and movement around the painting.

Since this initial discovery, Corse has relentlessly advanced the boundaries of the White Light paintings, introducing primary hues and the color black within a geometric vocabulary of forms to explore new compositional and perceptual possibilities. The exhibition at Pace includes Corse’s latest innovations in this series, featuring white multi- and inner- band paintings in a range of scales and shapes—from an 8’ x 8’ square to a 6.5’ x 10’ rectangle— as well as paintings incorporating black and red bands of various widths and configurations.

Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, California) 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.

Corse’s work has been included in historically significant group exhibitions, including Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A., Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2011);and Phenomenal: California Light and Spaceat the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2011). In 2018, the Whitney Museum of American Art opened the solo exhibition A Survey in Light. Her work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.