Mary Obering’s paintings are best characterized as geometric abstractions. Since the late 1970s she’s worked almost exclusively with egg tempera and gold leaf on gessoed panel, like the early
Renaissance masters.

This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view works the artist made using this old master technique to explore the universe in all of its complexity. To create the series, Obering borrowed from scientific journals she was studying at the time, particularly the linear renderings that illustrated experiments with particle collisions. These minimalist geometric forms appealed to her visual sensibilities and the results were more like wall sculptures imbued with all the beauty found in a religious altarpiece, what Holland Cotter called an imperial elegance when he wrote about the
work in a review of Obering’s exhibition at the Annina Nosei Gallery in the late 1980s.
Mary Obering was born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana. She received a BA in Experimental Psychology at Hollins College and an MA in Behavioral Science studying under B.F. Skinner at
Harvard. In 1970 she received an MFA from the University of Denver. She has lived and worked in New York City since 1971. Her work has been exhibited in the US and in Italy where she also keepsan active studio in Puglia. Her paintings are in the permanent collection of major institutions, among them; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Detroit
Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.