A Visit With Mary Obering
Mary Obering in her studio
On a recent visit to Mary Obering's home and studio, it felt like I was stepping into a movie set of another era, an era when artists occupied Soho’s industrial loft spaces to ply their trade and exchange ideas.
Mary's loft is a sprawling space with large plants and plenty of natural light, picture perfect in its representation of what I imagined life to be in 1970s and 1980s Soho. And that is perfectly fitting, as Mary Obering was in the thick of the scene in the 1970s, rubbing elbows and offering critique at dinners and studio gatherings with the now famous minimalist and conceptual artists who she also counted as neighbors.
I was invited to visit the artist within her domain to discuss her career and the current show on view at Marisa Newman Projects in Koreatown, “Mary Obering: Selected Works 1983-1987.”
The artist greeted me warmly in true southern style but with an openness that seemed to betray the behavior of a woman who was born in 1937 and bred into upper class southern society in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Mary found her way to Soho in the 1970s via Denver, Colorado where Carl Andre first saw her work in a group exhibition and suggested that with her talent she belonged in New York City. In this new environment, Obering embarked on a path of pure abstraction, influenced not only by painters such as Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, but also by what was happening around her - close friendships with Mary Hafif "she's a great painter," and Donald Judd “I really miss Don,” and other giants of this time.
In graduate school at Harvard, she studied Behavioral Psychology under B.F. Skinner. The scientific mindset and curiosity developed under Skinner later led to her interest in physics. While living an artist's life in Soho, she would also attend lectures on the subject and studied textbooks by Richard Feynman who created a widely adopted pictorial representation system for the mathematical expressions representing the behavior of subatomic particles, also known as Feynman diagrams.
Mary Obering, Analog, 1983
“Influenced by the movements of geometry and abstraction” these diagrams also caught Obering’s artist eye: “I was interested in that field and did a good bit of reading about it. I didn’t participate that actively in the area. But it interested me as an abstract and somewhat geometric art-maker, and those diagrams inspired me to do those works," "those works" being her “Event” paintings - two of which are included in the exhibition at Marisa Newman Projects, “Event, October” (1987) and “Muon Maker” (1987).
It seems natural for an abstract painter to find an affinity with scientific diagrams - each are distilling complex information into simpler forms for the sake of communication. These paintings of Obering’s, along with another series depicting abstract forms of the sun and moon, were part of a new development in the 1980s of engaging in the natural world. From the macrocosmic cycles of sun and moon, Obering goes beyond micro into the realms of the natural that are no longer observable without the assistance of highly sophisticated technology. To a realm where abstract schematics are necessary for human comprehension. This being right in her wheelhouse, Obering picks up on the formal nature of these abstract diagrams and with her painterly concerns elevates this mode of communication to high art, using her sense of color and training in gold-leafing to accentuate the action of molecular collision. The end results are honorific abstract paintings in homage to the fabric of life itself.
Mary Obering, Frasi Lunari I, 2004
Later on, after finishing in the studio, we traverse to the bedroom hallway where Obering shows me a series of paintings on paper from the early 2000s featuring the rising moon as observed from her kitchen window in Puglia, Italy (where she spends part of her year). It seems that her fascination with the natural world continues.
With a final farewell, and kind invitation from Obering to return again for a glass of wine, I’m off back onto the cobblestones of Wooster Street, head full of cosmic wonder and imagined scenarios from Mary’s extraordinary life in that loft.
—Brandon Johnson