Books

This catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition “Emily Mason: A New Surface, A New Problem, Paintings on Paper from 1977-1990” at Weber Fine Art in Greenwich, CT, September 14 – October 21, 2023.

This exhibition showcases Emily Mason’s works on paper, her final decade working in her most prolific medium. The title, taken from an interview of Mason with Lona Foote in 1975, encompasses Mason’s intuitive techniques when addressing the surface. In an excerpt from the essay  “Emily Mason’s Works on Paper, 1977-1990,” Mira Dayal writes in the catalog essay,

In Mason’s hands, the paper’s surface becomes its own environment or weather system—an ever-changing set of relations—with a landscape of forms-qua-continents crossed and surrounded by running liquids. We can almost picture the sun shining and melting blocks of color, and an atmosphere of fog sometimes passing over the work and manifesting as thinner veils of color, breaking at times to allow bright outlines of light to pass through.

This catalogue was published by the Bennington Museum on the occasion of the exhibition “Color|Gesture: Early Works by Emily Mason,” May 11 through September 9, 2019.

From the Bennington Museum:

The works in this exhibition, which focuses on the decade 1958-1968, show Mason developing her own unique style as she moved beyond Abstract Expressionism, which was based in gesture and movement, to create an abstraction of pure color laid down in delicate veils and washes of thinned oil paint, layered so that they explore effects of transparency and opacity, variegated textures, and complex color interactions. Oil on paper proved to be a perfect medium for her experiments. The small size of the works, quick drying time of the diluted oils, and portability of the materials meant these works could serve as a laboratory for innovation. By 1968 she had achieved an exquisite mastery of her materials. Hard-fought, improvisatory, and experimental, the works in this exhibition are not only a record of that achievement—they are where she worked it out.

Exquisitely illustrated, with one hundred full-page color reproductions, Emily Mason: The Light in Spring is the second extensive volume revealing the paintings and prints by American contemporary artist Emily Mason. Highlighted are sixty-eight of her recent paintings, completed since 2005, and thirty-two of her prints, in an overview spanning the last three decades and conveying work with five master printers.

“Emily Mason: The Fifth Element” is the first comprehensive presentation of Emily Mason’s work and brings long-overdue attention to this contemporary American artist. This volume includes eighty reproductions of the artist’s oil paintings, along with a selection of prints, highlighting many of the most significant works from each phase of her impressive career. David Ebony’s text brings Mason’s life and work into focus, showing how her unique painterly vocabulary has proven that the expressive possibilities of abstract art are indeed boundless.