Mary Temple may be best known for her immersive trompe l'oeil installations—subtle room-sized paintings of light and shadows of trees, flowers and shrubs. However, since 2013 the artist has built a body of work on canvas and paper which both departs from and amplifies the installation work. While the more recent paintings share the landscape as cornerstone, they expand in color, mark and complexity of surface.
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 the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in D.C.
The artist's work is held in many 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 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. The artist was represented by Mixed Greens Gallery in New York from 2001 until they closed operations in 2015.
Mary Temple was born in Phoenix, Arizona and has lived and worked in NYC for 27 years.