FRIEZE MASTERS: EMILY MASON

Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to share a solo presentation of works by Emily Mason (1932-2019) at the 2024 edition of Frieze Masters, London. Read the full press release here.

Born and raised in New York City, Emily Mason’s art education began in the studio with her mother Alice Trumbull Mason, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. A graduate of New York City’s High School of Music and Art, she attended Bennington College and The Cooper Union. In 1956, she was awarded a two-year Fulbright Grant to paint in Venice, Italy. There, she studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti where she first experimented with blotting and transferring paint onto the surface of the canvas. In 1957, at the Ponte de Rialto, Mason married painter Wolf Kahn (1927-2020), with whom she had two daughters. Mason passed away on 10 December 2019, the birthdate of her namesake, Emily Dickinson.

"During the decade . . . 1958-1968, she moved beyond Abstract Expressionism, first forging a style of gestural abstraction grounded in pure color, and then, by 1967-68, creating a highly personal style of delicate veils and washes of color that depends on complex effects of transparency and opacity, of layering, dripping, and bleeding thinned oil paints, to produce dynamic contrasts of color and texture."

- Robert Wolterstorff

"Mason preferred exploring over establishing a recognizable style. 'Exploring, it’s like being in touch with some inside energy, some force, and you know it when it starts to happen.' Her process was focused on these interactions and the compositions that would emerge from them, the mystical lessons of paint. As she developed her practice, Mason increasingly cultivated an economy of gesture. Her abstractions were the result of few interventions. 'The process is a series of moves, like a chess game,' she explained. At times, Mason barely seemed to touch the canvas, her colors beamed and yet pigments were few. At the end of a workday, Mason would let the painting rest. The oils would dry up a little and, in the morning, she would reengage with them. The painter was willing to follow the natural rhythm of a work. She remarked: 'This is something that is not taught in school, but time is very important in the creative process.' Each work had a flow; some were fast, some were slow. Mason spent a lifetime refining her intuitive relationship to time, when to wait and when to act. She would stay absorbed, until she finally had that feeling in her stomach: the work was done."

- Dr. Barbara Stehle