LOS ANGELES, CA.- Pace is presenting an exhibition of new works by Mary Corse at its Los Angeles gallery. On view from June 21 to August 16, this presentation marks the artist’s first gallery show in LA since 2017 and her first solo exhibition in the city since her 2019 survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Corse’s show at Pace in Los Angeles features new paintings and her Halo Room, a new architectural installation that she has been developing over the past few years. Holistically, the exhibition traces her latest experimentations in painting, shedding light on her radical inquiries into the phenomenological dimensions of art and her role as a key figure in the LA arts community for more than six decades.

Throughout her storied career, Corse—who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since she was a student at the city’s Chouinard Art Institute in the 1960s—has explored light, space, and perception in sublime, scientifically rigorous, and boundary-crossing abstractions across mediums. She is often associated with the California Light and Space movement and has always been committed to the possibilities of painting as her primary concern. As part of her empirical and highly tactile approach to art making, she has continually investigated the ways in which light can be both subject and material.

A sunset drive along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu in the late 1960s changed the course of her practice. Searching for a way to embed light inside her paintings, Corse investigated the industrial materials in the illuminated road markings along PCH and discovered glass microspheres. Soon after this revelatory event, she began applying these refractive microspheres onto the surfaces of her White Light paintings, endowing her works with a sense of illumination projected from within the picture plane itself that changes with the viewer’s position.

The artist’s presentation at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery centers on her new body of Diamond paintings—a continuation of the first diamond-shaped canvases she made in 1965—and includes several never-before- exhibited works produced this year. With her latest Diamond paintings, Corse delves deeper into the fundamental concepts that have defined her practice from its outset. She expands the scope of her inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of her oeuvre through new iterations of ideas that have long been essential to her work. In addition to Corse’s Diamond paintings, the show features one of her iconic, glowing light boxes. Early in her practice, the artist’s efforts to free her artworks from the wall led her to quantum physics, and she subsequently created a series of highly engineered light boxes, which she referred to as “light paintings.” Suspended using monofilaments, the light boxes are powered wirelessly by Tesla coils—high-frequency generators that transmit electromagnetic fields through walls, producing uncanny, spectral effects.

The exhibition also showcases Corse’s new Halo Room, an architectural installation that debuted in her 2024 presentation at Pace’s New York gallery. This work, which has been installed in the Los Angeles gallery’s outdoor courtyard, offers a participatory, intimate experience of scale, space, and light. When a viewer enters the room, they encounter a white light painting and as they approach the painting the resulting effect produces a glowing halo around the viewer’s shadow, registering their presence but also incorporating it into the painting itself.

This installation hinges on the energetic relationship between individual and object, producing a moment of intersubjective collision that facilitates a spiritual manifestation of bodies within space. Up to two participants will be allowed inside the installation at a time, and each viewer will only be able to see their own halo—a phenomenon that speaks to the personal nature of experiencing Corse’s art. The presence and presentness of the viewer within the Halo Room become a pure expression of grace, reflecting the ethos that has animated Corse’s practice for decades: as she puts it, “the art is not on the wall, it’s in your perception.”

At a time when so much contemporary art is figurative, and abstract work tends to the fantastical or psychedelic, Corse’s new work reminds us of the rigor, discipline, and inquiry about art-making itself that is central to Corse’s practice. -- Tom Teicholz, (opens in a new window) Forbes