MARY WEATHERFORD: THE SURREALIST
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present The Surrealist, an exhibition of new paintings by Mary Weatherford.
May 16 – June 28, 2025
Weatherford is a fearless believer in painting’s ability to reflect and express facets of life that would otherwise remain invisible, unexplored, and unfelt. She reveres and challenges legacies of modernist formalism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and other twentieth-century—as well as a host of earlier—art historical movements in equal measure, producing both grand gestures and subtle disruptions that allow her work to communicate extremes of beauty and pathos.
In The Surrealist, Weatherford demonstrates this emotional and technical range by working at an array of different scales and formats, and by using a variety of materials. The show features everything from vast murals to medium-format canvases. In addition to the neon lights that she has affixed to some paintings, she has also incorporated coral and starfish, revisiting an interest in such objects that dates to the late 1990s. These additional elements introduce a bracing—even surreal—presence in the fields of luminous color that characterize Weatherford’s work.
The painting that gives the show its title is an alternately brooding and seductive expanse of warm, pinkish, and reddish tones and high contrast chiaroscuro. Anchoring its upper left corner are a vertically oriented white neon tube and a large starfish whose curving arms find echoes in the swooping, organic movement with which Weatherford’s paints move across the linen. While the starfish—disjunctive, surprising, disarmingly somatic and sexual—is the most readily “surrealist” part of the painting, the work establishes a nocturnal, dream-like ambience that manages to be both menacing and comforting. The achievement of such poetic paradoxes is possible only because Weatherford takes risks, and because she understands that pleasure in painting is dependent on its ability to surprise viewer and maker alike.
As the show’s title suggests, harder-to-define phenomena like dreams, urges, and intuitions are also part of her purview. Weatherford makes the immaterial material, not only by evoking it or creating visual metaphors for it, but by making paintings that function as physical, immediately knowable objects with elusive, seemingly ever-shifting cores.