Still from A Frieze Studios Production, Mary Obering in NYC , 2018 © Mary Obering
The Affective Abstraction of Mary Obering
By Sara Buosco
Mary Obering, Outside and Inside, installation View, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York, photo by Guang Xu
The work of American artist Mary Obering (1937, Shreveport - 2022, New York) is key for interrogating the legacy of Abstract, Minimalist, and non-representational art. One of the most significant exponents of the artistic circle in SoHo, New York, from the 1970s, Obering’s practice interweaves stylistic citations and approaches, while also contemplating a Mediterranean sensibility. The exhibition Outside and Inside, held at Fondazione Giuliani, in Rome, 2024-2025, retraces the ethos of the artist’s practice in line with the recent exhibitions Piero Dorazio and Mary Obering, 2024, Mary Obering: Works from 1972-2003, 2022; and Window Series, 2019, all held at Bortolami, New York.
Sara Buoso
Rome, Italy 2025
The legacy of non-representational art does not bequeath a unified history, but recounts different stories and practices. The work of Mary Obering can be seen as an eloquent example for thinking about this legacy through a personal and poetic interpretation of the language of geometric abstraction. As Obering suggests in a statement dated 1988, her desire for non-representational art corresponds to her desire to overcome subjectivity in her artistic practice as a form of personal self-detachment that translates into the objectivity pursued by her work. She adds, however, that in her work, such questioning concerning the relationship between nature and human subjectivity is not a fixed task, and from the 1970s to the 2020s, her body of work is rather imbued with complexity. Whilst in Obering’s work such an ethical and aesthetic preoccupation leads to rigorous abstract composition, it is also true that her work is pervaded with an affective allure that exceeds rationalist composition and instills her practice with a new sensibility and values.
Although she was trained in sculpture from the early 1970s, Mary Obering chose painting as the medium of her practice. This explains why her picturality is supported by a plastic composition that is as much affective as objective. In her early works, her fundamental questioning about subjectivity and nature led the artist to privilege the genre of landscape in search of natural laws and the order of things in the world, as seen in the works Greeting the Spring, 1973; Shadows of the Evening, 1973; Pure and Remote View, 1973, presented in the exhibition Outside-Inside. In these series, it is evident that the artist attempts to move beyond the traditional scheme of painting's frontality and its associated metaphor, to connote the pictorial field with a telluric and territorial affective approach in relation to diverse cultural contexts she encountered in her life, comprehensively contributing to a different understanding of pictorial plasticity.
Mary Obering, Greeting the Spring,1973, Acrylic on Canvas; 96 x 120 inches, courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York, photo by Guang Xu
Obering’s personal interpretation of the pictorial field also reflects a Minimalist posture, a posture that emerged from 1971 when the artist moved to New York and joined the artistic community in SoHo after graduating with an MFA in painting from the University of Denver. In New York, in particular, Obering’s artistic research was encouraged by artist, Carl Andre with whom she cultivated a longtime friendship, and this phase of the artist’s career has been recently rediscovered and celebrated by the exhibition Mary Obering, Window Series, 1973, at Bortolami, New York, 2019. Since the 1970s, Obering’s practice was influenced by the Minimalistic method of reduction, seriality, modularity, and the phenomenology of objecthood, as seen in her choice of privileging monochromy. But not limited to the Minimalistic method of artistic investigation, Obering elaborated a particular pictorial technique consisting of a juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical panels attached one on top of the other, extending the lesson of Joseph Albers’ formalist investigation of shape and color as a Gestalt phenomenon. In this regard, it is important to recognize that Obering had a background in psychology, receiving a BA in Psychology from Hollins College in 1959, followed by further education in psychology at Radcliffe College, and post-bachelor work in experimental psychology with the well-known behaviorist B. F. Skinner at Harvard. These biographical notes help to explain why Obering’s picturality is not exempt from movements of self-affection and affectivity, split between the exterior and the interior, despite her claiming a phenomenology of self-detachment and objecthood.
Obering’s contribution is seen not only in her compositional style, but also in her personal interpretation for the notion of “color field” painting. Notably, according to the art-historian and art-critic Clement Greenberg, as he stated in his major essay American-Type Painting, 1955, a “color field” turns the pictorial composition into a space where “color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself,” as seen in the works of Abstract Expressionist painters like Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Arshile Gorky, among others, all belonging to New York School of Painting in the 1950s. Whilst citing the European suprematist and constructivist abstract tradition through the framework of the New York’s color field school contribution, Obering’s painting is imbued with a meditative and affective posture, as if a revelation happens on her pictorial surface. In other words, in Obering’s works there is always a latent and ethical knowledge of history fusing artistic and cultural contexts.
Mary Obering, Window Series #2, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 96 × 96 inches, courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York, photo by Guang Xu
Obering’s work foregrounds an in-depth meditation on composition, color, and luminous effects on the surface of her painting. This approach finds roots in Obering’s studying and appreciating the norms of Renaissance representation, and particularly the style of pictorial fenestration which the artist metaphorically interprets through a modern, psychological viewpoint. To contextualize this argument, it is helpful to refer to Obering’s friendship with artist Pietro Dorazio, one of the founders of Forma1, a neo-avant-garde Italian art movement of the 1950s, and internationally known for his personal contribution to abstract geometric composition in painting. This sensitive alliance was recently the object of a retrospective investigation for the posthumous exhibition Piero Dorazio and Mary Obering, 2024, held at Bortolami, New York, and recent curatorial research sheds new light on the Mediterranean influences that may have impacted Obering’s practice in conjunction with her several visits to Italy, as further attested by her residency in the region of Cilento in the late 1980s-90s. These biographical references help explain the affective tone that pervades Obering’s pictorial composition. If it is true that Renaissance painting epitomizes representation as a window open on the world that designates a horizon of knowledge, Obering draws on this metaphor and expands on the possibility of visualizing a new threshold for reflecting upon events and experiences in a meditative manner. Obering’s contribution to reinterpreting this metaphor, however, is not unique and a similar approach is found in the artistic investigations of the color field painter Mark Rothko whose pictorial investigations poetically figure an occluded front, citing among other references, the same occluded front found in the architectural illusionistic fenestration designed by Michelangelo Buonarotti for the Bibliotheca Medicea Laurentiana in Florence, 1571, leaving the pictorial surface as an in-depth color field. In addition to this style of composition contemplating architectural elements as part of her geometric composition, it is significant to foreground the chromatic investigation addressed by Obering, which whilst citing the ancient technique of velatura, or glazing, imbues her pictorial field with a new solar enlightenment through the purity of forms which all contribute intense affective and plastic values to her pictorial surface.
Obering’s contribution to revisiting the style of Renaissance fenestration is particularly informed by her psychological and affective posture, a framing that splits between the outside and the inside, as suggested by the title of the exhibition at Fondazione Giuliani, 2024-25. This approach is mainly evident in the pictorial series Arches, the watercolor series, Dream Planes, 1975, and Three Secrets, 1976, the oil on Masonite series, Redline, 1975, and the egg tempera on golden leaves and gessoed panel, Leap, 1981, which all fuse geometry and sensibility within a minimalist pictorial approach. Metaphorically, it could be said that Obering’s paintings function as poetic stanzas, windows open to occluded fronts over the horizon of knowledge, further suggesting a new contemplative way for thinking about nature and subjective experience. In other words, Obering’s oeuvre contributes to the juxtaposition of the tradition of color-field painting with the constructive and phenomenological composition of Minimalistic art, imbued with a Mediterranean solar sensibility.
Mary Obering, Paysage,1979, egg tempera, gold leaf on gessoed masonite, 20.8 x 20.8 inches, courtesy the artist
and Bortolami, New York, photo by Guang Xu
In the 1980s, Obering’s artistic investigation took an in-depth scientific and mathematical path, colliding into a cosmological and conceptual pictorial style. Whilst maintaining a non-representational posture, her practice pursued a quantum chromo-chromatic method of investigation, a term coined by the artist and suggesting a new materialist scientific method for investigating color as seen in the painting, Event, October, 1987, where the artist continues referring to Renaissance picturality through a meticulous material approach––in particular, her use of egg tempera, and golden leaves on gessoed panels like old master painting––which contemplates a questioning of natural laws through a rigorous interpretation of sacred geometry and its design. Geometry and spirituality are, in fact, keys to the series of paintings which constitute the triptych Sala delle Oche, 1990; Sala dei Magistrati, 1990; and Sala dei Castellani, 1990, a geometrical, abstract, and pictorial homage to the architecture of the Capitolini Museum in Rome, among the most ancient museum institutions in the world, renowned for its ancient and classical collections.
Ultimately, composition and color field explorations follow a line of artistic investigation where the solar myth pursued by the artist suggests a new sense of enlightenment as seen in the painting Sole/Sabbia, 1989, and rhythm, as evident in the series Prussian Walk, 1978, which all reverberate with radiance and vibrancy. The journey, stylistic citations, and meditative posture addressed by Mary Obering posits significant values for an understanding of affective geometry and color-composition, contributing to the legacy of both Abstraction and Minimalism.
Mary Obering, Three Secrets, 1976, watercolor on paper; 9 x 12 inches, courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York, photo by Guang Xu
Sara Buoso is an art critic and curator. She holds a PhD in Art Theory and History, Central Saint Martins, London, specializing in photology and practices of light. She is a lecturer of Contemporary Art History at AANT, Academy of Arts and New Technologies, and DAM, Digital Arts & Media Academy, Rome.
Sara Buoso