Fondazione Giuliani is very pleased to present Outside and Inside, the first presentation of the work of American artist Mary Obering (1937-2022) in a European institution. The exhibition is an in-depth exploration of her manifold painting practice, which extended into the study of landscape, the body, cosmology, maths, science and spirituality. Throughout her nearly five-decade career, Obering produced deceptively simple, geometric works, juxtaposing the strategies of Minimalism – basic arrangements, modularity, repetition – with a singular exploration of form and colour. While adhering to the pictorial language of geometric abstraction, she also consistently pushed its possibilities into more complex realms. It was as if the artist was never considering abstraction for abstraction’s sake, but rather investigating what abstraction could hold. Obering pared down the aesthetics of Minimalism, using painting techniques and materials more closely associated with the art of the Italian Renaissance, characterised by a marked painterliness, the layering of sumptuous colour, gold leaf and tempera.
Obering moved to New York in 1971, at the encouragement of Carl Andre. Here she became part of a vanguard community of artists living in the recently converted, former light-industry lofts of Soho, and established close friendships with Andre, but also Donald Judd, Marcia Hafif and Sol LeWitt. This community would remain immensely significant to Obering throughout her lifetime, while she pursued her own fiercely independent path.
In the early 1970s, Obering began exploring minimalist painting’s ability to push beyond an internal pictorial space; the spatial layerings in her works on canvas created architectonic and conceptual thresholds into changing landscapes. Yet, by the end of the 1970s, she had already abandoned canvas for masonite panels to begin work on a new Arches series, a significant development that sparked her career-long investigation of the Renaissance notion on painting as a window on to the world. Once again referencing compositional elements of landscape, these works further articulated an evocation of the horizon line, formal properties of the window, and the mediating role between outside and inside. In many ways the Arches series was the architectural and conceptual bridge between Soho and Italy, a country that Obering had loved since she was a teenager and where she began to live part-time, in the heart of the Salento, beginning in the late 1980s. Her love of Italian Renaissance painting had previously led to her use of egg tempera and gold leaf on gessoed panels, which would become her signature materials, albeit while her paintings continued to embody the rigorous formalism of Minimalism.
Obering later became increasingly interested in particle physics and cosmology, connecting her interests in art and science; working with different shaped panels, she illustrated things like particle collisions within a minimalist framework. Increasingly driven by materials, in the 1990s she began to create multi-panel works that were intended to push beyond the painting plane and activate the walls on which the works were hung. Increasingly more sculptural, the paintings’ literal presence – their physical qualities and relationship to their surroundings – were foregrounded, engaging with the exhibition space, and underscoring their relationship both to architecture and to the body. In her ongoing contemplation of light and density, there was also something increasingly constructed about her works. As always, she was making a painting, rather than painting a painting.
Loosely outlining a trajectory of some of Mary Obering’s most significant body of works, Outside and Inside examines the investigations, queries and big ideas that she was working through in each series: landscape, architecture, vision, personal relationships, and the internal and external forces at work in the world.
Mary Obering was born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana and died in New York in 2022. She received a BA in Psychology with a minor in art at Hollins College in 1958. She then studied experimental psychology with BF Skinner at Radcliffe Graduate College (Harvard University’s women’s liberal arts college). She received an MFA in painting from the University of Denver in June 1971, and shortly thereafter moved to New York. Obering’s works have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; The Denver Art Museum and Nelson-Atkins Museum among others. Her works are in the permanent collections of major institutions, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Perez Art Museum, Miami, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.
A very special thanks to Bortolami, New York and Studio Obering.