Mary Temple

Mary Temple is well known for immersive trompe l’oeil installations that subtly recreate shadow and light; however, in the past several years, the artist has built a body of abstract work on canvas and paper that both departs from and builds on the installations. While the more recent works share the landscape as a touchstone, they are developed further, expanding in color, active shapes, and complex surfaces. She writes: “During daily walks through city parks, I take visual notes to inform an ongoing landscape narrative, which is the basis of my abstract paintings. In the studio, while constructing the picture, I try to convey the experience by the inconvertible particularity of how a specific painting exists. The paintings reflect aspects of landscape within the cityscape—hard lines broken by curves; subtle hues interrupted by graphic primaries and fluorescents. By these interpositions, I slow the flow of information and displace the given homogeneity, in order to circumvent immediate recognition, aiming for an unhurried acknowledgement of associations—things identified with, but not explained.”

Mary Temple has exhibited internationally and throughout the United States. She has completed commissioned projects for solo and group shows at sites including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Sculpture Center, Long Island City; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Rice Gallery, Houston; Western Bridge, Seattle; The Drawing Center, New York; Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo; and the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian. Temple is the recipient of a 2019 MacDowell Fellowship, the 2010 Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship, the 2010 Basil Alkazzi Award for Excellence in Painting, a 2010 and 2007 NYFA Fellowship in Painting, and was NYFA’s Lily Auchincloss Fellow in Painting in 2007. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and ARTNews, among other publications.