Reception: May 2, 5:30-7:30
Catalogue Available with Essay by David Ebony Excerpted from "Emily Mason: The Fifth Element" (New York: Braziller, 2006)
Santa Fe, NM – Considered one of America’s finest Color Abstractionists, Emily Mason is now in her fifth decade of painting and is widely regarded for her unique and poetic modality of pictorial expression. Mason mediates interior feeling and expression through elegantly composed rhapsodies of form and color harmony.
In May, the breathtaking virtuosity of Mason's color orchestrations will be accessible to viewers in a major solo exhibition of her paintings at LewAllen Contemporary. This show will include the paintings from a solo exhibition now on view in the Philip Johnson Building at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi.
Emily Mason’s art emerged out of the New York-based action painting tradition exemplified in the mid-20th century by de Kooning and Pollock, yet she is distinguished from that tradition by an approach that is thoroughly her own. The critic Robert Berlind said of her in Art in America: "Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado. The poetry of these paintings is lyric, not epic."
Above all, it is color that provides the poetic language for Mason's canvases. Her work is distinguished by its glorious luminosity, exuberance and color intensity, combined with well defined, though subtle, underlying geometry.
A painting by Emily Mason is a medium to the sublime: employing color as a force for spiritual transformation. Her processes of pouring, staining, scumbling, scraping, blotting and layering, in combination with deft brushwork, mimic the processes of growth and regeneration in nature.
In Emily Mason: The Fifth Element, a monograph published by Braziller in 2006 and now excerpted in the catalogue for this exhibition, art critic David Ebony asserts that Mason "has proven that the expressive possibilities of abstract painting are boundless.” To the New York School tradition, he writes, “Mason has added her own sense of unity and structure as well as consistently enigmatic, amorphous spaces that appear to be softly lit from within.”
These “enigmatic, amorphous spaces” conjur the fifth element of Ebony’s book title. According to Aristotle, Ebony explains, the four basic elements of earth, air, fire and water are complemented by a mysterious fifth element of ether in which the heavens are arrayed, “its nature the more noble in proportion to its distance from those here.”
It is with this idea that Ebony enthuses about the ethereal nature of Mason’s paintings. “Balanced by quiet passages and ethereal spaces, each of Mason’s compositions is mediated by a refined sense of structure,” he writes. “She is in command of a geometry that is, however, never defined explicitly. Often it is submerged in the infinite spaces of her colorful compositions; and the geometric forms seem to emerge from or dissolve into an ethereal mist.”
Mason describes her process as collaborating with chance while staying alert to the beauty of unintended consequences – painting “the way a bird sings.”
Today, Mason’s work may be seen as a kind of bridge between the New York School of the 1950s and 1960s and more recent developments in abstract painting. This status makes her an exceedingly important figure in contemporary American painting.
Mason was born in New York City in 1932. Her mother was Alice Trumbull Mason, founding member of the pioneering American Abstract Artists group. Emily Mason attended Bennington College and then the Cooper Union, receiving both her BFA and MFA from the Cooper Union. Following her graduation, she lived for two years in Italy, where she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice as a Fulbright Scholar. Mason has painted continuously since the 1950s and has taught at Hunter College in New York since 1979.
