Mary Heilmann
Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) is an American artist whose influential practice spans painting, ceramics, and furniture, bringing an irreverent, deeply personal sensibility to the traditions of geometric abstraction and Color Field painting. Born in San Francisco, Heilmann came of age amid California surf culture before studying literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and later poetry, ceramics, and sculpture in the Bay Area. After moving to New York in 1968, she shifted from sculpture toward painting, developing a distinctive visual language characterized by vivid color, loose geometry, irregular grids, and deceptively casual surfaces. Rather than treating abstraction as purely formal, Heilmann draws upon memory, music, popular culture, landscape, dreams, and lived experience, allowing individual paintings to carry associations and narratives beneath their simplified forms. Her work frequently disrupts the seriousness historically associated with modernist abstraction through unexpected color combinations, playful shapes, and deliberately imperfect gestures, and she has extended this approach into ceramics and brightly colored furniture that often become part of the presentation of her paintings. Long regarded as an influential “painter’s painter,” Heilmann has been the subject of major museum exhibitions, including the retrospective Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone at the New Museum and Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures at Whitechapel Gallery in London. Her work is held in major collections including The Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Hammer Museum. Heilmann lives and works in New York.
Available Works
2000
Lithograph in colors
Image Dimensions: 27 x 37.5 inches (68.6 x 97.5 cm)
Framed Dimensions: 33.5 x 45.5 inches (85.1 × 115.6 cm)
Edition No. AP 3/10
Framed in light wood frame with glass glazing.
2021
Archival pigment inks printed on Duna board with acrylic paint.
21 x 26 x 1 in.