Emily Mason
EMILY MASON
5 January - 11 February 2017
Selected Works
Press Release
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Emily Mason. The exhibition will open on 5 January and remain on view through 11 February 2017. A public reception for the artist will be held on 5 January from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Karen Wilkin.
Emily Mason’s paintings are explorations of the expressive possibilities of color. Sheets of vibrant hues float across her canvases, drifting together and meeting as if for a fleeting moment. Using a range of paint applications, Mason creates pools of color that vary in density—flat expanses merge with delicate clouds of pigment, coalescing into deceptively complex compositions.
While her works may be broadly characterized as celebrations of color, each painting has an individual mood and captures a particular emotional and chromatic temperature. With a nuanced touch, the artist implies the passage of time and conveys unnamable yet specific experiences in her paintings. As Karen Wilkin notes, Mason clearly “delights in color and revels in the fluidity of her chosen medium.”
Emily Mason has 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 her in Art in America, “Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado.”
Born and raised in New York City, Emily Mason graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art. She 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.
Mason has exhibited steadily 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 is included in numerous public and private collections.
