Mary Corse, Untitled (Octagonal Blue), 1964

Kim Conaty: My name is Kim Conaty. I am the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum, and I am the curator of Mary Corse: A Survey in Light.

In this particular work, she's thinking about a couple of issues. One is trying to think through how to capture a field of color on the wall that doesn't necessarily need to take a rectilinear format. So we have the work that's in an octagonal form, in fact, in a framing device that she constructed herself.

Second, with Octagonal Blue, Corse was working with this idea of how to bring light into the painting.

Narrator: She began adding tiny metallic flakes to the paint in an effort to reflect ambient light.

Kim Conaty: For her, this was something that was a challenge, that was more than just depicting light, as artists have done for centuries using color or thickness of paint to try to capture the look of light. But for her, the effect was not as intense as she was hoping.

Narrator: As Corse continued to experiment, she focused next on the reflective properties of white acrylic paint—testing its potential in a wide variety of formats.