Associated with the 1960s Light & Space Movement which emerged in southern California, Mary Corse is primarily known for her minimalist, monochromatic paintings, through which she explores the relationship between materiality and perception. She shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with the possibility that light itself could serve as both a subject and material of art.

The present work is exemplary of a technique that Corse first developed in the mid-1960s, which consisted in mixing acrylic paint with glass microspheres - small particles which are commonly used in the white lines of lane dividers on highways - and then painting vertical monochromatic bands onto the canvas. While many of her contemporaries shifted to sculptural and environmental installations in their investigation of light, Corse instead consistently explored the possibilities of painting. She perpetuated the Modernist tradition by recurring to the monochrome and grid, but simultaneously developed her own knowledge in quantum physics, which resulted in her employment of unusual “painting” materials, including glass microspheres, Plexiglas, metallic flakes and fluorescent light.

“Quantum physics really impressed me…I was starting to understand that there is no objective reality as clear as we might think. I had been looking for this objective truth, making these light pieces that were true. Then I realized that perception was as much a part of reality as reality.”
(Mary Corse in an interview with Carolina A. Miranda, ‘The ‘whoa’ moment and Mary Corse: The painter who toys with light is finally getting her due’, Los Angeles t.mes s, 2 November 2017, online)

In the present work, the band of black acrylic and glass microspheres on the right enabled Corse to bring light into the painting, which persisted as her ultimate goal. This translucent effect is counterbalanced on the canvas by the band of light grey acrylic to the left. According to the artist, what truly activates the work is the interaction between the painting and the viewer, and more specifically the latter’s perception of the work. As Corse herself acknowledged, the glass microspheres do not reflect the light but refract it, an effect which establishes a forceful relationship between the surface, the viewer and the light. The surface of the work brightens and darkens before the viewer’s eyes as he moves in front of it, and is hence subject to continuous change. The incorporation of these glass particles into her paintings was a turning point within her practice, which came after multiple experimentations with different generators of electricity, to create light within her works, and was a solution she has recurred to ever since.

Untitled (DNA Series) is hence an embodiment of Corse's research into the brain’s response to incoming light frequencies when these reach the cells in the eye. These investigations can be read as a visual testimony of her exceptional technical and scientific expertise, which has been widely celebrated in her two recent ground-breaking survey exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018 and at the Los Angeles County of Modern Art in 2019.