ART CITIES: Paris-Emily Mason

Emily Mason was a visionary American abstract painter known for her vibrant, lyrical approach to color and composition. Born and raised in New York City, Mason was immersed in the world of modern art from a young age. She began her artistic education in the studio of her mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, a pioneer of American abstraction and a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Other Rooms, Works from 1959–2017” marks a long‑awaited moment in the European reception of Emily Mason, offering the first major monographic presentation of her work on the continent. Spanning nearly six decades and gathering around fifty wokrs across canvas, clayboard, and paper, the exhibition reveals an artist whose practice unfolded in continuous motion—never settling, never repeating, always searching.

Mason’s artistic lineage is formidable. Born in New York in 1932, she grew up in the charged atmosphere created by her mother, Alice Trumbull Mason—painter, poet, printmaker, and co‑founder of the American Abstract Artists group. Through Alice, Emily encountered a constellation of modernist figures: Josef Albers, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt, and later John Cage and Merce Cunningham. This was not simply an inheritance of names but an immersion in a world where experimentation was a way of life.

Yet Mason’s work never reads as derivative of this environment. Instead, it reflects a refusal to be anchored by it. From the beginning, she resisted the idea of a “signature style,” choosing instead to cultivate a practice guided by intuition, sensation, and the willingness to step into the unknown. This resistance to categorization may partly explain why her work has remained underrecognized in Europe, despite its presence in private collections and a brief 2004 print exhibition in Venice, the city where she studied in the late 1950s.

To enter Mason’s world is to accept a certain disorientation. Her paintings do not offer the comfort of a stable vocabulary; they shift, expand, and contract, moving between opacity and translucency, gesture and stillness, luminosity and shadow. The works resist immediate classification, instead inviting viewers to inhabit a space where boundaries dissolve and color becomes a force that shapes its own architecture.

Her early exposure to the Museum of Modern Art, her studies at Bennington College, and her encounters with Hans Hofmann placed her within the broader currents of mid‑century American abstraction. But Mason’s trajectory diverged from both the New York School’s muscular expressiveness and the Bay Area’s atmospheric lyricism. She absorbed these influences only to transform them, forging a path that was neither doctrinal nor reactionary.

Italy in the 1960s, New York City, and the rural expanses of West Brattleboro, Vermont—each of these places left its imprint on Mason’s sensibility. After she and her husband, painter Wolf Kahn, purchased a farm in Vermont in 1968, the couple divided their time between the city and the countryside. The shifting light, mutable weather, and seasonal rhythms of Brattleboro became part of her visual vocabulary, not as literal references but as atmospheric undercurrents.

Her teaching position at Hunter College, beginning in 1979, added another dimension: the discipline of articulating her process without ever codifying it. Mason remained committed to experimentation, continually renegotiating her chromatic range, rethinking gesture, and exploring the materiality of paint.

Mason is often described as a master colorist, and the exhibition confirms this reputation. But color is only one facet of her expansive practice. The works on canvas and clayboard reveal a sumptuous variety of applications—thin veils of pigment, saturated fields, abrupt shifts in density, and delicate transitions that seem to hover between states.

Her engagement with paper and printmaking, particularly her monotypes, demonstrates an equally rigorous curiosity. These works echo the material qualities of her paintings while asserting their own internal logic. The exhibition’s inclusion of a previously unseen series from 2016—small works in black, white, and gray—adds a surprising counterpoint. Stripped of her characteristic chromatic exuberance, these pieces reveal the structural intelligence underlying her compositions.

What emerges from the exhibition is not a linear evolution but a constellation of approaches, each one testing the limits of what painting can do. Mason’s work is defined by its refusal of stability, its embrace of risk, and its commitment to the sensory experience of color and form. Her paintings do not resolve; they unfold.

This first major European retrospective offers a rare opportunity to encounter an artist whose work thrives in the space between certainty and discovery. In a contemporary moment that celebrates the multiplicity of painting, Mason’s oeuvre feels not only relevant but essential—an invitation to dwell in the richness of ambiguity and the beauty of perpetual transformation.

Photo: Emily Mason, Untitled, 2005, Carborundum monoprint on paper, 56.8 x 59.7 cm, 22 1/2 x 23 1/2 in (unframed), 64.2 x 66.8 x 5 cm, 25 x 26 x 2 in (framed), © 2026 Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation/ARS, Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery

Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 rue de Turenne, Paris, France, Duration: 10/1-14/3/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://www.alminerech.com/