Mary Corse, Untitled (Negative Stripe), 1965

Narrator: Here, Corse has contrasted the bright, painted surface with a thin strip of raw canvas running down the middle.

Kim Conaty: She’s imagining that there is literally a space behind that surface, from which light could be emitted. So she begins to make these strips, these interior bands that bisect her canvases. She does this in the diamond-shaped painting in the gallery, and also in the hexagonal-shaped painting in this gallery.

In both cases, we’re looking at a negative stripe, meaning that she painted the rest of the painting except for the central stripe down the middle. In another group of paintings related to these, she did the opposite, where she over-painted a stripe down the center of the painting.

And in both cases, she’s exploring the idea of how to actually almost crack the painting open. How can we get into this interior space? Or at least make a suggestion that there is space beyond the flat picture plane.