Emily Mason
Untitled
1990

About the Item

EMILY MASON Untitled, 1990 Oil on paper 29 x 23 inches 73.7 x 58.4 cm Signed and dated: "Emily Mason 1990 VT" (lower right recto) Formally, Emily Mason (1932-2019) is perhaps best known for her vibrant pigments and her intuitive grasp of color theory, as well as her unusual painting method that she mastered over the course of her career: using cat food tins, she mixed pigments and solvents to specific and varied consistencies, then poured them directly onto the canvas in a curious interplay with her painting’s other ‘pours.’ Crucial to the overall process was the time elapsed between these poured layers. Often, Mason would gesturally spread out the poured paint layer with a paintbrush or apply other physical treatments such as scraping, sanding, finger painting, or contact with an unconventional tool such as an old t-shirt. Each of Mason’s paintings represents a calculated series of interactions between each mixed paint tin’s distinct alchemy; perhaps a given paint mixture would yield a crackling effect, a glossy sheen, or an ‘oil and water’ dispersion. Miles McEnery Gallery proudly represents the Emily Mason Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation

Creator:
Emily Mason (1932 - 2019, American)
Creation Year:
1990
Dimensions:
Height: 29 in (73.66 cm)Width: 23 in (58.42 cm)
Medium:
Oil,Paper
Movement & Style:
Abstract Expressionist
Period:
1990-1999
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
Seller: 359931stDibs: LU2085213978102
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Emily Mason

Emily Mason was born in New York City in 1932. She graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art and studied at Bennington College for two years before attending and graduating from the Cooper Union. She spent 1956–58 in Italy on a Fulbright grant for painting, where she studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice.

During Mason’s two-year stay in Italy she married the painter Wolf Kahn, whom she had met earlier in New York. Mason and Kahn’s daughter, Cecily Kahn, is also an abstract painter, as was Emily Mason’s mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in New York.

Mason spent more than six decades exploring her distinctive vein of lyrical, luminous abstraction. Her paintings executed in oil are distinguished by a sense of intriguing intimacy combined with uncompromising, though gentle, intensity. They evince a sense of structure within open, luminous space and juxtapose robust color harmonies with vivid contrasts that create an engaging optical vibration.

Robert Berlind said of the artist in Art in America, “Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado.”

Mason exhibited steadily throughout her career since she emerged on the Tenth Street gallery scene with multiple exhibitions at the Area Gallery in New York City in the 1960s. In 1979, she was awarded the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize by the National Academy. She taught painting at Hunter College for more than thirty years. Her work has been included in numerous public and private collections.

Emily Mason: The Fifth Element, a comprehensive treatment of her work by Art in America associate managing editor David Ebony, was published in 2006 by George Braziller publishers. A second monograph, Emily Mason: The Light in Spring, was published in 2015 by the University Press of New England.

Mason died in December of 2019 in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Find a collection of original Emily Mason paintings and other art on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by Miles McEnery Gallery)