Mary Weatherford

Book excerpt: This career-spanning volume documents the first museum retrospective devoted to the work of Mary Weatherford, a daring practitioner of American abstraction and a leading painter of her generation. This career-spanning volume documents the first museum retrospective devoted to the work of Mary Weatherford, a daring practitioner of American abstraction and a leading painter of her generation.Over the last three decades, Mary Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice, from her early 1990s target paintings based on operatic heroines, to the expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that brought attention to her practice in the 2010s. Mary Weatherford: Canyon—Daisy—Eden presents a survey of Weatherford’s career, drawing from several distinct bodies of work made between 1989 and 2017. As constant experiments with color, scale, and materials, these works as a whole reveal the continuity of Weatherford’s interest in human experience, both personal and historical.Featuring 120 full-color plates and expansive installation views, this volume—published by Gagosian in association with the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College—documents an exhibition presented at the Tang and at SITE Santa Fe.