For the past 30 years Mary Temple has made paintings that locate between spaces of intuition and conception, between abstraction and depiction. Beginning with the natural world, Temple responds to light and shadow, shape and color. Not a landscape painter, but a painter of experiences and observations of the evanescent, she communicates fleeting and specific encounters with natural environments.  Works are painted alla prima, with the goal of correlating the pleasure of the painterly process with that of witnessing the sublime. 

Temple has exhibited her work internationally and throughout the United States. She has completed commissioned projects for solo and group institutional exhibitions that include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF, CA; SculptureCenter, LIC, Queens, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Rice Gallery, Houston, TX; Western Bridge, Seattle, WA; The Drawing Center, NY, NY; Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo, Japan and many others. Temple exhibits her work with Pamela Salisbury in Hudson, NY Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA, and Half Gallery in NYC.

The artist’s work is held in private, corporate and institutional collections internationally, among those are the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The GSA, Houston, TX; MTA Arts for Transit and NYC Cultural Affairs; NYC Percent for the Arts; the Fondation Francés, Senlis, France; the Salomon Foundation for Contemporary Art, Annecy, France; Bank of America, Charlotte, NC; Credit Suisse, Zürich Switzerland; Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Boston MA; the Charles and Mary Kaplan Family Foundation, Washington, DC, and NYU Langone Medical Center, NY, NY to locate a few.

Temple is the recipient of a 2024 Surf Point Foundation residency, a 2019 MacDowell Colony 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.

Mary Temple was born in Phoenix, Arizona and has lived and worked in NYC since 1996.