Gaye Korbet

MFA ’12 Fine Arts Low-Residency

Heidegger wrote not so much about what art is but rather what art does; he believed that it discloses the nature of being to us. I took to this explanation because it left the “what art is question” for everyone to decide for themselves. This recent painting represents a kind of milestone in my own practice. It expresses (or is beginning to do so) what feels like a material manifestation of the real nature of my own being. My hope is it will evoke meaningful feelings in those onlookers Rothko referred to as sensitive observers. After twenty years of work I, like Agnes Martin, have finally arrived at the starting line.



Before earning an MFA from MassArt in 2012, Gaye Korbet earned a BFA from Syracuse University, worked as an illustrator in the Boston area and a designer for WGBH, and taught design and color theory as an adjunct professor at area colleges. While primarily a painter, Korbet also makes conceptual prints and animations. After a long stretch of working representationally, Korbet moved into working abstractly, believing that the nature of abstraction is to allow the observer the freedom to construct their own experience of the work.

Little-Splinters_-Korbet_Headshot