Summer Light, 2024
Shellac ink on Gampi Torinoko
Unframed: 22 1/2 x 30 1/8 inches (57.15 x 76.53 cm)
Framed: 26 1/4 x 37 x 1 1/2 inches (66.67 x 93.98 x 3.81 cm)
 

© Mary Weatherford. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.

Selected by Laura Hoptman

Mary Weatherford (b. 1963, Ojai, California) has become increasingly recognized as one of the leading painters of her generation, as well as one of the most astute and daring practitioners taking on the legacies of American abstraction. As she explores and expands the medium’s possibilities, she honors its history by seizing opportunities to break with tradition at every turn. Over the course of her career, she has produced feminist revisions of large-scale Color Field painting, posited new directions for the landscape genre, and explored the social histories of California. Her notable incorporation of sculptural elements—including the neon tubes that have been a presence in her work since 2012—as well as her fearless and physically embodied approach to painterly gesture, have allowed her to employ abstraction as both a formal language and a poetic, highly personal mode of engagement with the world outside the studio.

Mary Weatherford was the subject of the survey exhibition Canyon–Daisy–Eden, presented at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2020) and SITE Santa Fe, NM (2021). Other solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Italy (2022); Aspen Museum of Art, CO (2021); Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA (2014); Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University at Bakersfield, CA (2012); and LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Recent group exhibitions include Color is the First Revelation of the World, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2024); Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, NY (2023); America: Between Dreams and Realities, Selections from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Montreal, Canada (2022); Aftereffect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO (2019); Between Two Worlds: Art of California, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2017); and The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2014). Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate, London, England; Brooklyn Museum, NY; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA. In 2019, Lund Humphries published an in-depth monograph surveying the artist’s oeuvre. Weatherford lives and works in Los Angeles.