Mary Corse Sets a Thrilling Pace Exhibition In LA

Forbes

21 hours ago

Mary Corse, Pace Gallery LA, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 June 21 – August 16, 2025. Photography courtesy of Pace Gallery
One of the most thrilling shows I've seen recently is Mary Corse at Pace Gallery LA on view through August 16, 2025.
Corse, who recently turned 80, has been an LA artist most of her life, having attended Chouinard Art School (which became CalArts) in the early 1960s and living and working in Los Angeles ever since.
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.
The Pace LA show features many of Corse's Diamond shaped works which she has been exploring since 1965. The works are shaped canvases tilted to be diamonds rather than squares and whose surface extends beyond the edges concavely in such a way that, although they appear two dimensional, the works are actually three-dimensional. The canvases seem to float in front of the wall. These subtle shifts in how the work is presented and what draws our eye, ask us to consider what is painting? What is sculpture?
Mary Corse, Pace Gallery LA, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 June 21 – August 16, 2025. Photography courtesy of Pace Gallery
Corse's White Diamond paintings are a rigorous investigation of perception, color, and our own interactions with her work. Some of the Diamond series recall early Russian Constructivist work, Malevich in particular. In other of her works, such as her paintings that feature a reflective black stripe down the middle, it is as if the action and drama in the work have been reduced to a single strip, The ways in which our eye and mind behave when looking at her work, adds a further dimension to Corse's work.
Corse's work has also investigated light, and her Pace presentation includes Corse's Halo Room, which is a light installation, in a room of its own that interacts with your presence and shadow as you approach it, and that is animated wirelessly by a Tesla coil (Tesla the scientist not the car).
Many California artists rejected Minimalism as a New York, primarily male, art movement that espoused a cool impersonal aesthetic. Instead, several California artists turned to making works that investigated light, space, or were land art interventions and that often took advantage of materials and knowledge from California's Aerospace industry and institutions such as CalTech.
Mary Corse, Pace Gallery LA, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 June 21 – August 16, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Instead, Corse's work demonstrates that Minimalism can be personal, have drama, and can be rooted in California's special light. And that is as thrilling to ponder as it to see.