PRESENTATION: Mary Corse

Mary Corse explores materiality, abstraction, and perception through geometric, gestural paintings developed over her fifty-year career. Emerging with the Light and Space movement in 1960s Southern California, she used unconventional media like plexiglass and illuminated boxes. In 1968, she began using glass microspheres, creating light-responsive paintings that shift based on the viewer’s position and surrounding environment.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Mary Corse’s latest solo exhibition is a powerful convergence of her past and present—a luminous presentation of new paintings alongside her much-anticipated “Halo Room,” an architectural installation years in the making. The show offers a window into the latest chapter of Corse’s ongoing artistic journey, one defined by her bold exploration of perception, light, and the deeply personal nature of seeing. For over sixty years, Corse has stood as a quiet force in the Los Angeles art world, continually pushing the boundaries of abstraction through a practice that is both cerebral and profoundly sensory. Throughout her remarkable career, Corse has pursued an intimate dialogue with light—treating it not just as a tool, but as a material, a subject, even a metaphysical presence. Her work straddles the realms of science and sensation, rigor and reverie. While she is often linked to the California Light and Space movement, Corse’s commitment to painting has remained at the core of her practice. She brings an empirical curiosity to her process, using touch, intuition, and experimentation to explore how light can be embedded, reflected, and perceived. A pivotal moment came in the late 1960s during a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. As the sun dipped below the horizon and headlights glinted off the road, Corse noticed the way certain materials seemed to trap and bounce light back. She discovered that the secret lay in tiny glass microspheres used in road paint. This insight transformed her work. By incorporating these refractive beads into her “White Light” paintings, Corse gave her canvases a unique luminosity that shifts as the viewer moves—paintings that seem to glow from within, alive with changing perception. At the heart of the exhibition is a new series of “Diamond” paintings—a continuation of a format she first explored in 1965. These fresh works, many of which are being shown for the first time, deepen her long-standing inquiry into geometry, symmetry, and the metaphysical potential of painting. With these pieces, Corse returns to essential questions: How can painting hold light? How can a canvas shift with the viewer’s gaze? How does perception become presence? Alongside these new works is one of Corse’s early technological innovations: a glowing light box. These “light paintings,” created with the help of Tesla coils that transmit energy wirelessly, appear to float, suspended in space and humming with invisible energy. They are haunting, poetic objects that blur the lines between science and spirit, engineering and enchantment. The exhibition culminates in the “Halo Room”—a striking architectural installation first unveiled at Pace Gallery in New York in 2024 and now reimagined for Los Angeles. Installed in the gallery’s outdoor courtyard, the room invites visitors into an intimate encounter with light and space. Upon entering, viewers find themselves in front of a white light painting. As they move closer, a glowing halo emerges around their own shadow—an ethereal reflection of their presence. Each person sees only their own halo, underscoring the deeply individual nature of perception that Corse has always championed. The “Halo Room” becomes a space not just to see, but to feel seen. It captures the subtle yet powerful interaction between body and object, subject and space. With only two people allowed inside at a time, the installation becomes a sanctuary of sorts—quiet, immersive, and deeply personal. It is, in Corse’s words, a reminder that “the art is not on the wall, it’s in your perception.” Through this exhibition, Mary Corse invites us not just to look, but to witness—to experience light not as something external, but as something felt, something known in the body. It is a masterful offering from an artist whose work continues to shimmer at the intersection of science and soul.

Photo left: Mary Corse, Untitled (Blue Diamond with Black Inner Band), 2024, Glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas, 233.7 x 233.7 x 10.2 cm, © Mary Corse, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo right: Mary Corse, Untitled (White Diamond with White Inner Band), 2024, Glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas, 280.7 x 280.7 x 9.5 cm, © Mary Corse, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 21/6-16/8/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/