Flesh mixed with gowns like kneaded satin; this is the substance of flowers.

—Francis Ponge

It is impossible not to be dealing with cliché when drawing flowers. How to do it and let that show?

—Ree Morton

Go to the country to look at flowers. Overlapping whorls of color, transitory, spiraling.

—Rosemary Mayer

Proserpina / Devil Chaser: Rosemary Mayer and Ree Morton is the first two-person exhibition dedicated to the work of Rosemary Mayer and Ree Morton—groundbreaking artists who shared a friendship for several years before Morton’s untimely death in 1977. While closely associated with the feminist art movement and Post-Minimalism, their radical, multidisciplinary practices exceed these categorizations. Inspired by a wide range of overlapping interests including Baroque and Rococo art, language, memory, and the natural world, Mayer and Morton developed their own distinct material and conceptual vocabularies and embraced hybridity, decoration, allegory, theatricality, kitsch, and biography as critical forms.

The installation at Gordon Robichaux is anchored by Rosemary Mayer’s Proserpina and Ree Morton’s Devil Chaser, two rarely exhibited sculptures created in 1975 that were inspired by plants, flowers, and the language and mythology connected to them. The exhibition also gathers together and integrates artworks that expand on the artists’ affinities and divergences, including several of Mayer’s delicate color pencil and watercolor drawings exploring fabric, flowers, and language; a recording of Mayer reading from her 1976 artist’s book Passages; and a series of Morton’s Signs of Love text paintings and Beaux sculptures. Two works on view directly memorialize the artists’ friendship: a flag dedicated to Mayer from Morton’s Something in the Wind installation (1975) and a drawing from Mayer’s balloon work Some Days in April (1978), made the year after Morton’s death. The artists’ friendship, exchange, and practices are also contextualized through a selection of archival materials including correspondence, publications, sketchbook drawings, and installation and performance documentation. A commissioned text by Marie Warsh—writer, historian, co-director of the Rosemary Mayer Estate, and the artist’s niece—further illuminates the exhibition with her intimate perspective.

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with The Estate of Rosemary Mayer and The Estate of Ree Morton, with the support of Allan Schwartzman.