Emily Mason “Chelsea Paintings”

Miles McEnery Gallery (520 W 21st St.)

This event has ended.

MILES McENERY GALLERY presents the first posthumous New York gallery exhibition of works by seminal colorist Emily Mason (1932 – 2019).

Featuring paintings primarily created between 1978 and 1989, Chelsea Paintings explores a distinct, transformational phase in the career of an artist whose life was dedicated to furthering the conversation of American Abstraction through a redefinition of non-objective and Color Field painting. The exhibition coincides with a retrospective, She Sweeps With Many-Colored Brooms, on view at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut through March 2021.

Chelsea Paintings is named for the career delineation that occurred in 1979, when Mason moved her studio practice from the 12th-and-Broadway space she had shared with her husband, the painter Wolf Kahn, since the 1950s to her own floor-through, 4,700-square-foot loft on 20th Street in Chelsea. From then on, regardless of where she started a work of art (she also had a studio in rural Vermont), she would always bring it to the Chelsea studio to ‘finish’ it in the distinct light and aura of that space.

An avidly independent-minded colorist and mark-maker, the early works on view in Chelsea Paintings were created when stark Minimalism was on trend in the Chelsea art scene; Mason’s vivid, chromatically intense abstractions evolved in a contrasting manner to the formal restraint being exercised by her peers.