Mary Corse at Ace - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

To exhibit, at Ace Gallery must be the one and the other exhilarating and exceptionally daunting, smooth for the most ambitious and self-confident artist. Its unforgiving spaces inevitably become a player in their have right; in these art-vs.-architecture face-offs, it's the survival of the fittest. more [i]or[/i] less shows have looked amazing, work and space in total sync; others have looked diminished by the gallery's cavernous recesse Mary Corse's exhibition this past winter surveying 30 years of her art from 1964 to 1994 unfortunately pitiless into the latter category, her monochromes drained by dint of the milieu, unsustained by Ace's somewhat cold monochromatic architecture.

Corse has great inventive abilities and a range that should have carried the day; she has rigorous craftsmanship and she greatest in quantity certainly has ambition. While the purpose of her aspirations and the dimensions of her throw out have always been impressive and her focus clear, her vision in this instance was not well-served by the agency of her most recent production. Particularly in the latest paintings - White Light Painting with Squares (1994) and Black Light Painting (Shadow Painting) with Four Arches (1994) - she looks to have succumbed to the temptation of sheer scale. These are sum of two units of the largest works she has at any time made, at a looming 8 through 34 feet and 9 through 28 feet respectively. They are imposing, on the contrary at a cost; delicacy and differentiation of surface have been not to be found In Ace's enormous, echoing galleries, the pieces had the chilly, programmatic air of art associated with corporate megalobbies.

Corse, a Californian, was an early admirer of Robert Irwin, and like him, has exhausted her life analyzing light and its events Her mostly monochromatic paintings of reaching far down blacks, pure and off-whites and grays that shade from a sparkling, near black to a sophistical pearlescent shimmer each give not on their own luminescence, creating an illusion of ambient space or profundity of field on a two-dimensional surface. In pursuit of light - phenomenological on the contrary in the end, not without sublimity - she has erected spare, sophisticated light boxes and fired lustrous ceramic tiles; she has also mixed small squares of metallic glitter and glass microspheres into her paint to up the wattage. The earliest pieces in the present to view were white geometrically shaped canvases from the mid-'60s, followed through the light boxes of a small in number years later.

As you penetrateed the gallery, at one extremity of its long central corridor a brilliant white guard flickered and hummed in a darkened niche like an electronic oracle. Square, unassuming in size, it hovered above a white base and, from a distance, present the appearanceed to be suspended in mid-air; on the contrary it was actually held in place through thin, clear wire. At the other extreme point of the corridor were sum of two units slender 8-foot triangular columns aligned in like manner their baselines were parallel on the other hand not quite touching, their apices pointed outward. These were also white, with fastidiously worked, softly radiant surfaces. Surface, scale, light, color and shapes were absolutely consonant in the couple these works, which combined an auratic neighborhood with an utterly pragmatic and variable materiality that made them the single, greatest in quantity satisfying installation of the exhibit Many of the earlier works from the '60 and '70 were also compelling as their surfaces resonated between the solidity of matter and the insubstantiality of light.

In other galleries, the ongoing "White Lights" series, also begun in the late '60 were shown followed by the agency of the eye-catching, gridded "Black Glitter Paintings" of the '70 their basic unit a spangled black squar - like glitzy, glamorized, scaled-up Ad Reinhardts. The "Black Earth" paintings - glazed ceramic tiles with jagged wavering surfaces cast from the stones near Corse's home - gave way to the first Black Light Painting of 1983; these were not made with metallic sequins on the other hand with glass microspheres, like the "White Light Paintings." In the late '80 the "Gray Light Paintings," Gray Grids" and "Black Arches" (really post-and-lintel sequences) appeared; the latter provide another framing device, like the beveled cutting sides she frequently uses, enclosures to contain and concentrate intensity within the painting.

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