Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present Mary Corse, Mary Obering, Noboru Takayama, James Turrell in Booth A20.
Ahead of Mary Corse’s solo exhibitions at the Dia:Beacon and Whitney Museum of Art, we will be showing a selection of her early works, including a rare “Black Earth” work from the 1970s. After the consciousness-driven ethereality of the White Light paintings, she found herself compelled to firmly root her work in solidity and the body. The slabs of earth harnessed for the Black Earth series broadly index the ground from which they come. When stacked or mounted into an imposing grid the deep black tiles fired to a glossy sheen give the impression of reconstituting a continuous site, though each tile of a given dimension charts a singular area of the same rock. Repetition is no guarantee of sameness; the tiles are unique despite the consistent process, meaning that although each is numbered into installation sequence, a gridded arrangement exposes constitutive irregularities. The overall appearance is disorienting. In its foundational rotation from ground to wall, it has the remarkable effect of suggesting a pool of water that should be at one’s feet, a sense fostered by the emergent forms recalling not their source rocks but lapping crests: A darkened mirror for a would-be gazing Narcissus.
We are thrilled to announce our representation of Mary Obering with the inaugural presentation of her geometric abstract paintings and works on paper from the 1970s and a selection of panel paintings from the 1980s. Obering identifies herself as a geometric art maker. In her earliest paintings she explored color and space by constructing fields of colored canvas, laying one piece on top of the other in vertical and horizontal orientations playing with ideas associated to color field and hard-edge painting. A seismic shift occurred in the mid-70s when she moved away from working on canvas and began to explore the old master technique: egg tempera, gold leaf on gessoed panel. The panel paintings are imbued with all the beauty found in an Italian Renaissance masterwork, what Holland Cotter called an imperial elegance when he wrote about the work in a review of Obering's exhibition at the Annina Nosei Gallery in the late 1980s. Mary Obering was born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana. She received a BA in Experimental Psychology at Hollins College and her MA in Behavioral Science studying under B.F. Skinner at Harvard. In 1971 she received an MFA from the University of Denver. She has lived and worked in New York City since 1971. Her works are in the permanent collections of major institutions, among them; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Noboru Takayama explores themes of memory, the body, and the tension between opposing forces. Raised in the physical destruction and political unrest of post-World War II Japan, he often relates these concepts to the perils of modernization. A sculptural work that was part of Noboru Takayama’s original and seminal installation “Underground Zoo” will also be on view. Takayama began using railroad ties in the late 1960s as a requiem for the many lives lost amidst the establishment of Japan’s modern railway during the history of its invasion of Asia. A similar work from “Underground Zoo” was recently on view and acquired by the Centre Pompidou-Metz.
In anticipation of our upcoming exhibition of James Turrell’s new glassworks in Los Angeles this summer, we will debut Turrell’s new circle glasswork at the fair. This work is a unique composition that sweeps through hundreds of different color themes over 2 hours. Light diffuses across the glass pane to make the shallow space indeterminable to the eye.The colors are inspired by Transneptunian Objects (TNO): the identified objects orbiting our sun beyond Neptune.
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