• Mary Obering

    Mary Obering

    Mary Obering was born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana. She received a BA in Psychology at Hollins College in 1959. She studied calculus at Radcliffe College (Harvard’s women’s college) and did post bachelor work in experimental psychology with BF Skinner at Harvard shortly after. She received an MFA in painting from the University of Denver in June 1971, and shortly thereafter she moved to NYC.

    In the early 1970s, Obering began exploring minimalist painting’s ability to push beyond its internal pictorial space, generating a technique uniquely her own. Within this same decade the artist abandoned her canvas support, beginning to paint on Masonite panels with a variety of approaches. Obering’s exploration found fertile ground with the introduction of mediums which would become the artist’s signature over the next four decades: egg tempera and gold leaf. In employing Old Masters techniques, the artist envisioned a blending of architecture and painting; the antique artworks produced with these materials inevitably recalling the churches and buildings in which they were housed. The paintings created with these unexpected materials were presented by some of New York’s most daring and respected galleries in the 1980s and 1990s, Julian Pretto, Annina Nosei, and John Weber.

    Obering’s 1983 work "Analog," was painted during a period when the artist frequently traveled to Salento, Italy, a southern region of Puglia where she studied traditional techniques for applying egg tempera and gold leaf—materials used to ornament the altars of Catholic cathedrals and reliquaries. Situating these historically rich tones in a minimalist composition, Obering conveys an essence of the divine unrestrained by iconography.

    Obering’s works have been included in exhibitions at 1975 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Artists Space, New York; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; The Denver Art Museum and Nelson-Atkins Museum among others. Her works are in theermanent collections of major institutions, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

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