Mary Corse
Untitled (Black Light Painting)
1979
signed and dated ‘Mary Corse/1979’ verso
glass microspheres and acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 inches; 121.9 x 121.9 cm
$240,000 USD
Provenance
The Artist
Juliet McIver, Los Angeles
Ms. Doty Andre, Los Angeles, acquired in 1989
Private Collection, New Mexico
Private Collection, Ohio, acquired from the above, 2010
Acquired by the present owner from the above.
Many will associate Mary Corse with the California Light and Space movement. It’s not an entirely incorrect categorization. She was in the right place and the right time, exploring similar concepts with similar materials, even abandoning painting for a short period to make what she refers to as the ‘big light boxes,’ in pursuit of objective purity. But unlike her contemporaries, who continued to move away from painting into objects, she returned to the medium with enduring focus: ”light through painting.” She was siloed from other artists, working in relative isolation in Topanga Canyon, and identified with the New York school of Abstract Expressionism (you can see here the nod to Josef Albers).
By the late 1960s, Corse had moved from flat, white monochromes to big light boxes, then back to painting—albeit with the glass microspheres (the same that line highways) that would go on to become a signature of her work. She began to utilize black in her work in the 1970s and the composition of Untitled (Black Light Painting) (1979) directly references her light boxes from the previous decade.The work is from an important period and priced at $240,000, which is lower than the primary market for recent works. Her market has been slowly, steadily growing—auction prices are generally stable, with most works selling. Obviously, The Baer Faxt rates this work a BUY.
– JB
If you’re interested, shoot me an email at josh@thebaerfaxt.com or hit the Inquire button below
Mary Corse (b.1945, Berkeley CA) lives and works in Topanga, California. She investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her sixty-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 began to create paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. She first developed her White Light paintings, and by the 70s, she transitioned to making her Black Light series using black acrylic paint and microspheres. The Black Earth works followed: large ceramic slabs that she fired in a custom-built kiln and glazed black. After thirty years of working monochromatically, she reintroduced primary colors into her paintings based on her understanding of color as constitutive of white light. Corse’s art emphasizes the abstract nature of human perception, expanding beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.
Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, the artist’s first solo museum survey, was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Comprehensive catalogs were published with both surveys. In 2021, Corse was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai, which traveled to the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, in 2022. A focused presentation of Corse’s work was on view at Dia: Beacon in New York, for four years highlighting historical works from the collection.
Corse was also included in the major presentation Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A., Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2011. Recent group exhibitions include Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023); Long Story Short, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023–24); Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945–1990, Palm Springs Art Museum, California (2024–25); and Plein Soleil: De Renava x Centre Pompidou, De Renava, Corsica, France (2025), which was organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Upcoming exhibitions include Minimal, Pinault Collection, Paris, which opens on October 8, 2025, and All light: Light and Space yesterday and today, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, which opens on November 15, 2025, and will remain on view through March 1, 2026.
The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Dia Art Foundation, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Corse is represented by Pace Gallery and Locks Gallery, PA.
