Mary Henry | Selected Works from the Artist's Estate

May 7 - June 27, 2020

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Select Works from the Artist’s Estate by renowned artist Mary Henry (1913-2009). Henry gained recognition late in her career for her reductive, geometric abstractions with activated, graphic palettes. Henry’s Mondrian-inspired grid works and offbeat neo-Constructivist style was influenced by the Bauhaus School's formal ideas and her teacher László Moholy-Nagy's fascination with pure expressiveness through line and color.  

In 2001 the artist stated, “I continue with non-objective work using geometric shapes. I believe it is the way that best expresses what I feel and what I think is the deepest, most significant art form now and for the future. I believe that it is not necessarily a good thing to be constantly trying to be new; beauty is what we should be looking for.”

The works in the gallery include Henry’s Prismacolor drawings and a vertical T-shaped diptych painting created in the 1990s. Henry’s intimately scaled drawings possess the same gravitas found in her paintings; ideas and emotions are transmitted through formal compositions and subtle dynamism. Each artwork exemplifies her meticulous draftsmanship, sensual line, and carefully considered color palette, which reference weather, nature and landscaped gardens.

Mary Henry was an American artist whose work, most notably large oil paintings and acrylics but also prints, was characterized by geometric abstraction. Many of her pieces are diptychs and triptychs. Some of her work resembles, variously, op art, constructivism, or even psychedelic art. Born in Sonoma, California, Mary Henry studied 1933–34 at the California College of the Arts (then called the California School of Arts and Crafts) in Oakland, California, where her teachers included modernists Ethel Abeel, Glenn Wessels, and Marie Togni. She graduated in 1938 with a BFA. Henry's work is in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Institute of Design IIT (Chicago, IL), Microsoft, Safeco, Hewlett-Packard, and Amgen, among many others.