Mary Corse: Untitled (Two Triangular Columns), 1965

Kim Conaty: This sculptural grouping is really an intellectual extension of Corse's shaped paintings.

Corse constructed these columns on her own, working in a very hands-on way in her studio. She cut the plywood, she sealed it together, and she painted the columns very carefully with white acrylic paint, trying to hide, as much as possible, any of the marks of her painting. In that way, she was trying not to show the hand of the artist in the creation of these works. She went so far as to spend a good deal of time sanding the surfaces of these sculptures, again, to underscore their more objective nature versus subjective nature.

As she's always thought about painting as something that might take us into a different dimension and that might somehow become more of an ethereal experience, she also tries to get across the same idea even in these large, approximately 8-foot-tall columns. To do this, she worked with plexiglass. This was the first time in her work that she did begin to work with plexiglass, and she created bases for the work so they would not sit directly on the ground, but they would actually appear to hover off the ground, just a couple of inches, in a way echoing the space in between the two columns.