Mary Weatherford: I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By
Taking viewers behind the scenes during the installation of Mary Weatherford’s I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By at Gagosian, New York, this video features interviews with the artist and John Elderfield.
Gagosian is pleased to present I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By, new paintings by Mary Weatherford. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Weatherford makes large paintings comprising grounds of spontaneously sponged paint on heavy linen canvases surmounted by one or more carefully shaped and placed colored neon tubes. The canvas—prepared with white gesso mixed with marble dust, and worked on with Flashe paint, a highly pigmented but readily diluted emulsion—supports startlingly diverse applications of color. The surface of the paint ranges from matte and velvety to transparent and translucent. The canvas is at times densely filled, reading as a painterly continuum; at others, it shifts in color from edge to edge of the painting; and at yet others it contains clusters of marks set in relatively bare surroundings. And the color itself varies significantly: blurred blues, muted yellows, and carnival reds; mineral hues, evoking slate or steel; pinks suggestive of fruit or flesh; and many different blacks, recalling shiny feathers.
The neon tubes attached to these fields of color advance a unique practice that Weatherford began in 2012, inspired by illuminated signs along the streets of old Bakersfield, California. In her use of neon, she transformed what had previously been used for advertising—and had been appropriated as such by earlier artists—into a radically new form of pictorial drawing. Casting an industrial light onto the fields of color, the neon tubes read as hand-drawn lines across the surface, although they are sometimes so bright that they are blinding to look at, creating afterimages. Weatherford has used one or as many as five individual tubes, often bent away from the surface, and on occasion extending beyond the edges of the canvas. The cords for the neon fixtures make their own layer of drawing on top of the painting, and lead down to large magnetic transformers sitting like anchors on the floor.
While Weatherford’s previous paintings have mainly made reference to the experience of places or climates, her new ones find their inspiration in situations and events. Drawing upon her responses to current events and her experience of premodern narrative pictorial compositions, she thinks of these new canvases as aspiring to the function of earlier history paintings that tell of actual or mythological happenings to invoke fundamental and topical concerns.
Weatherford’s first survey exhibition will be presented at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, in February 2020, and will travel to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in September 2020.
Taking viewers behind the scenes during the installation of Mary Weatherford’s I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By at Gagosian, New York, this video features interviews with the artist and John Elderfield.
In conjunction with her exhibition The Flaying of Marsyas at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Mary Weatherford discusses the featured paintings, which are directly inspired by Titian’s late, eponymous masterpiece of circa 1570–76 and reflect her enduring fascination with the painting.
The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).
Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, an exhibition at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice presents new paintings by Mary Weatherford inspired by Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570–76). Francine Prose traces the development of these works.
Mary Weatherford speaks to Laura Hoptman about her new paintings, the Train Yard series. Begun in 2016, this body of work evokes the sights and sounds of railroads and night skies. The series will be shown for the first time in late 2020, in an exhibition at Gagosian, London.
We visit the artist’s California studio as she prepares for her exhibition I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By. She speaks with Jennifer Peterson about her new paintings, her studio process, and the artists who have inspired her.
Art historian Katy Siegel discusses her recent exhibition at the Rose Art Museum and publication “The heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler with Gagosian’s Alison McDonald.