David Lynch and Mary Obering

Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by David Lynch, I was a Teenage Insect, his fourth at the gallery.

A group of new paintings, drawings, and watercolors will be on view. Within these works Lynch functions as an omnipresent narrator who candidly describes his representation of objects and figures in situations that are simultaneously commonplace yet unexpected.

Lynch’s five-decade career includes an extensive body of painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, installation, music, and film. While studying at PAFA in the late ‘60s, Lynch had a vision to make his first “moving painting”; a sculptural painting beneath a moving projection titled Six Men Getting Sick. This multimedia work marked Lynch’s first foray into filmmaking. Since this time his prolific body of work has touched on subjects of the organic body and industrial sites in various states of decay; describing a deeper human experience both beyond and within the everyday. Often depicting these scenes with a language of surrealism and mystery, Lynch’s work balances at the porous divide between the body and the world it inhabits.

Retrospectives of Lynch’s work have been exhibited in Torun, Poland (2017), Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia (2015), the Pennsylvania Academy (2014) and Laforet Museum Harajuku, Tokyo (2012). Lynch was also the subject of a major survey exhibition at The Air is on Fire at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris in 2007. Upcoming exhibitions include a major survey David Lynch: Someone is in my House, at the Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht opening November 2018, and an exhibition at HOME in the summer of 2019 in collaboration with the Manchester International Festival.

David Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana and studied painting at the Boston Museum School and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Lynch is also known as a filmmaker and recording artist who has produced critically acclaimed films such as Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and the television series Twin Peaks.

In the south gallery, Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Mary Obering, her first at the gallery.

For the last 50 years, Obering has painted geometric abstract compositions exploring the essence of color through the lens of reductivism. The exhibition will include a series of early works from the 1970s in which she explored color and space by creating monochrome fields of color in acrylic on canvas. She then cut the canvases into horizontal and vertical panels that she attached, one on top of the other, onto a large-scale monochrome field. This idea of layering, of creating space with minimal two-dimensional color field relationships, can be thought of in the broader context of painting in New York at the time but also through the enduring influence of Josef Albers and his investigations of shape and color.  

At the encouragement of Carl Andre, Obering moved to a Soho loft in 1971. With the new availability of a bigger studio space, she was able to work on a larger-scale, laying the paintings on the floor and assembling the cut canvas panels forming geometric abstract arrangements. It was also her new found community of artist friends, such as Donald Judd, that encouraged this modular approach to abstraction. In a 1974 Artforum review of Obering’s work at Artists Space, Roberta Smith writes of these paintings, “This physical construction is countered by a perspectival illusion which the placement of the pieces creates. Obering’s muted color is reminiscent of Marden’s and the work vaguely suggests a semi-abstract Classical landscape.” 

Continuing her color and spatial experimentation, a shift in her technique occurred in the mid-1970s. Obering moved away from canvas and began to employ the old master process of egg tempera, gold leaf on gessoed panel. With the rise in New York in the 1970s of multimedia, performance, and the broadening influence of conceptual art, painting seemed to be under siege. However, a group of New York painters were radically returning to traditional methods of application. The technical aspect of painting with these materials appealed to Obering’s interest in scientific engagement, and she has subsequently employed these materials to explore scientific concepts such as particle physics and natural phenomena; a nod to her studies in the late 1950s.  

Mary Obering was born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her works have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Artists Space, the Wadsworth Atheneum, The Denver Art Museum and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art among others. Obering’s paintings are in the permanent collections of 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.

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