Amorepacific Museum of Art (hereafter, APMA) presents Mary Corse: Painting with Light, the American artist’s first comprehensive solo museum survey in South Korea, from November 2 to February 20, 2022.

Over the last six decades, Corse’s work has continuously investigated perception, properties of light, and ideas of abstraction. Comprised of 34 monumental works selected from Corse’s expansive career, this exhibition highlights her ambitious and complex investigations in painting, explores the manifestation of light and its phenomenological experiences, and forges for Corse a unique place in the history of abstraction and twentieth-century art. The featured works have been drawn from various series, including the artist’s seminal White Light paintings, begun in 1968, examples of her Black Light paintings from the 1970s, works from her clay-based Black Earth series, Arch and Inner Band paintings, as well as sculptural pieces including her argon light boxes, and a monumental free-standing Beam.

“I want to thank Amorepacific Museum of Art for my first museum exhibition in Korea. I am very honored to have the privilege and I hope we experience from so far away a like mind in our shared humanity,” said Corse. The exhibition reveals a deep insight into the artist’s practice and ongoing dialogue with perceptual awareness. The works embody rather than merely represent light, inviting viewers to experience them in innovative ways. Collectively they open themselves up to their environment and create an experiential encounter for viewers, grounded in vision and movement. APMA sincerely hopes that this exhibition will provide new opportunities to expand and transcend one’s perspective on light. For visitors’ safety, pre-reservation made via APMA’s official website (https://apma.amorepacific.com) is required for all entrants. For more information, please visit https://apma.amorepacific.com

[About the Artist]

Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, California) has pursued a sustained investigation of abstraction, materiality, and perception through subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings made over a six-decade career. Emerged amongst a generation of artists inthe mid-1960s that were living and working in California, light became both the subject and object of her art. While studying at the Chouinard Art Institute in the late 1960s, she began experimenting with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases,works with Plexiglas, and illuminated boxes. Between 1966 and 1968, her interest in the relationship between light and perception led to her experiments with argon light boxes powered by Tesla coils. Her work developed in parallel but at a remove from artists associated with the Light and Space movement in Los Angeles, to which she has often been compared. Unlike those artists, Corse’s experiments with electric light ultimately led her back to including visible brushstrokes in her paintings, a subjective gesture she had previously removed. In the 1990s, Corse reintroduced primary colors into her paintings based on her understanding of color as constitutive of white light. She continues to explore notions of subjectivity, perceptual awareness, and the experience of radiant light and her paintings open themselves up to their environmental surroundings by capturing and refracting light while engaging the viewer in both physical and metaphysical encounters of body and mind. Corse’s innovative handling of materials that both capture and refract light ensures that our perceptions of her paintings change as the lighting shifts or we move about the space. Corse makes the inherent abstractness of human perception felt instead of merely seen.

Corse has held numerous solo exhibitions including the 2019 presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018 and Dia: Beacon in 2018. Corse’s works reside in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dia Art Foundation, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Long Museum, Shanghai; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.