MARY STEPHENSON: MARY! GO ROUND

White Cube Paris is pleased to present ‘Mary! Go Round’, Mary Stephenson’s solo exhibition.

January 24 - February 22, 2025

For Stephenson, oil paint is a tool for navigating her unconscious, giving form and structure to emotions, ideas and the slippery nature of memory itself. Made over the course of a year, the paintings in ‘Mary! Go Round’ conjure liminal realms that exist somewhere between the internal and external world or, in her own words, ‘where the figurative shifts into abstract’.

In addition to the paronymic pun of the ‘merry-go-round’, the title of the exhibition refers to Stephenson’s use of oil paint to direct and route her internal dialogue. The artist’s introspective approach is mirrored in, and facilitated by, her attitude towards paint, which she treats not solely as a medium but as a collaborator or ‘wingman’. Speaking directly to ‘Mary!’, the title can be read as a demand on, or call to, the artist by the canvas, that marks the beginning of a synergistic exchange between artist and medium. The reference to a fairground carousel also speaks to the emotional oscillation and resurfacing engendered by her painting practice, a loop that involves the return to childhood memories, experiences and environments.

In these recent works, areas of throbbing, saturated colour seem to dissipate into sheer, stratified grounds – a diffuse application of paint that is tempered by the inclusion of ambiguous shapes and crisply rendered areas of compositional segmentation. In Delicate Structures, In A Sunflower Field (2024), rows of yellow spheres lead towards a collection of forms that variously recalls a Brutalist building, a makeshift cardboard den and a paper aeroplane. Evading any logical sense of scale or space, Stephenson’s scenes, much like childhood memories, afford even the most minute of gestures the status of monumentality.

In ‘Mary! Go Round’, Stephenson uses colour, form and the materiality of paint as conduits to the intimate recesses of the mind. Through her particular approach to painting and its vicissitudes, the works come to stand as portals into a personal unconscious, as well as the raw material from which universal experiences and collective memories arise. Acting as umbilical cords between the internal and external, fantasy and reality, these ‘cathartic playgrounds’ are sites of the psyche that distil, for a moment, that which is fleeting and intangible.