After thirty years of working monochromatically, she reintroduced primary colours into her paintings based on her understanding of colour as constitutive of white light. The Black Earth works followed-large ceramic slabs that she fired in a custom-built kiln and glazed black.

First developing her White Light paintings, by the 1970s she began making her Black Light series with black acrylic and microspheres. Combining these tiny refractive beads with acrylic paint, she creates paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. In 1968, Corse discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways.

Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. Mary Corse investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her sixty-year career.Įarning a BFA in 1968 from Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, Corse developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California.