Gallery News
A selection of exhibitions presented in galleries by art critic Patrick Javault
Emily Mason : Other Rooms, Works from 1959-2017
For too long an artist known only to other artists, Emily Mason (1932-2019) only achieved true recognition in the final years of her life. Her mature work, which emerged in the early 1960s, was considered marginal due to its connections to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. The fact that she worked exclusively on human-scale formats and prioritized color and light further contributed to her unique style. This first French exhibition, which brings together just over 25 oil paintings on canvas and paper (the two media being treated in a very similar way) and a group of 16 monotypes on paper, allows us to gain a comprehensive view of her work.
Throughout her life, accompanied by the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Mason believed that her work was “in its process analogous to the work of nature, and its result aims at the beauty of a great storm or that of a day lily.” This closeness to nature did not prevent her from experiencing painting as a constant experimentation of a chemical, almost alchemical, nature, in which chance and intuition played a significant role. Working by superimposing veils, rather than layers, the artist’s entire approach is dictated by a demand for transparency: that of the colors she spreads, brushes, and erases, giving them the greatest fluidity, but also that of the process into which she draws the viewer. Her most structured works may evoke Richard Diebenkorn, but the experience she offers is of a more intimate nature, with extreme attention paid to the points of contact between the colors; a handful of added strokes sufficing to change the balance between analogous or complementary colors.
In order to connect with something deeper within herself, Emily Mason embraced a form of detachment rooted in Taoist philosophy. The artist thus sees herself less as a producer of forms than as an agent who facilitates the manifestation of phenomena that surprise her and, in a certain way, transcend her.
From January 10 to March 14, 2026, Almine Rech, 75003 Paris.
Curator: Erik Verhagen