Mary Weatherford: Train Yards

Gagosian presents “Train Yards,” an exhibition of paintings by Mary Weatherford. Her artistic practice challenges the high modernist flatness praised by American painters from the 1950s and 1960s, by imbuing her creations with the illusion of spatial depth and a romantic spirit of existential inquiry.  Weatherford is known for rooting abstract painting in subjective experience, exploring urban and rural environments while experimenting with internal painterly dynamics, including light, collar and gesture. She is also interested in the relationship between a painted surface and various three-dimensional addenda. Weatherford started including neon in her work in 2012, inspired by the illuminated signs omnipresent in the streets of Bakersfield, California, where she was then working.The Train Yard series (2016-2020) featured in the exhibition follow the artist’s interest in the poetics of place, especially sites of mass transportation and locations where the conditions of urban life reveal themselves with especial intensity. The paintings also include white neon light tubes that evoke the singular and distinctly American history and aura of their subject.