Mary Corse: A Survey in Light

“Mary Corse’s first solo museum survey is a long overdue examination of this singular artist’s career. Initially trained as an abstract painter, Corse emerged in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement. She shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both subject and material of art. This focused exhibition will highlight critical moments of experimentation as Corse engaged with tropes of modernist painting while charting her own course through studies in quantum physics and complex investigations into a range of “painting” materials. The survey will bring together for the first time Corse’s key bodies of work, including her early shaped canvases, freestanding sculptures, and light encasements that she engineered in the mid-1960s, as well as her breakthrough White Light Paintings, begun in 1968, and the Black Earth Series that she initiated after moving in 1970 from downtown Los Angeles to Topanga Canyon, where she lives and works today.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China

“Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary artists have cultivated intimate relationships with their materials, establishing a framework of interpretation revolving around materiality. Their media range from the commonplace to the unconventional, the natural to the synthetic, the elemental to the composite: from plastic, water, and wood, to hair, tobacco, and Coca-Cola. Artists continue to explore and develop this creative mode, with some devoting decades of their practice to experiments with a single material. The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China brings together works from the past four decades in which conscious material choice has become a symbol of the artists’ expression, representing this unique trend throughout recent history. Some of the most influential Chinese contemporary artists today are featured in this exhibition, including Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, Lin Tianmiao, and Ai Weiwei. The Allure of Matter premieres at LACMA before traveling to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, and finally the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

This exhibition is accompanied by the first scholarly volume to examine Chinese art through the lens of materiality. It is co-authored by the exhibition’s curators, Wu Hung, Smart Museum Adjunct Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, with Orianna Cacchione, Smart Museum Curator of Global Contemporary Art.”

• per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson