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Mary Heilmann
Mary Heilmann is an American painter based in Manhattan and Bridgehampton in Long Island, New York. She has had solo shows and traveling exhibitions at galleries including 303 Gallery (Manhattan) and Hauser & Wirth in Zurich, Switzerland and at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio and the New Museum on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. She has been cited by many younger artists, particularly women, as being an influential figure.
Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. In 1947 her family moved to Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles she joined her local diving and swimming team, an activity that she devoted herself to until 1953 when her father died of cancer and the family returned to San Francisco.
In 1959 Heilmann enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She recalled that it was “the beach, the surf, the surfers, the great shacky beach houses” which drew her there, an extension of the life she had made for herself in her late teens at San Francisco's North Beach. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in literature and minoring in art, in 1962, she attended San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1963, in the hopes of earning a teaching credential.
While at SFSC she met Ron Nagle, an artist, and began studying ceramics in earnest, having dabbled in the medium while at UCSB. In 1965 she began studying in the master's program in ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, drawn as so many were to the modernist ceramicist Peter Voulkos. While there Heilmann studied not only with Voulkos, but with the sculptor and ceramicist Jim Melchert, and Karl Kasten, a painter and print-maker. During her time at Berkeley Heilmann became friends with the artist Bruce Nauman, who was a student at the University of California, Davis. Naumann introduced Heilmann to his teacher, William T. Wiley, an artist who taught her for a short time.
Heilmann moved to New York City after graduating from Berkeley in 1968. She felt that both her interests and the work she was making (see Ooze, 1967) would find kinship with shows including Dick Bellamy's Arp to Artschwager Show at Noah Goldowski Gallery; Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction at Fischbach Gallery; and the Primary Structures Show at the Jewish Museum. But fellowship was not to be. Heilmann was excluded from a number of shows from the era, with 1969’s Anti-Illusion at the Whitney Museum of American Art being particularly crushing. That rejection led Heilmann away from working in sculpture (see The Big Dipper, 1969) and towards painting. She chose not to embrace the Color Field painting of the moment, and instead produced what she has called a “materials-based sort of conceptual, anti-aesthetic, earth-colored, ironic painting that was often hard to look at.” Her move into painting had her further experimenting with new spontaneous and casual styles, techniques and mediums, bright colors, drips, flatness, and unusual biomorphic geometries. The early paintings were, in her view, devoid of emotional content, possessed of a non-inflected, pure color. For Heilmann the goal was a painting which eschewed craft and seduction, and was instead “tough” and “plain.”
Heilmann places her work in the tradition of geometric painting—though she has also said that “abstraction” is a perfectly suitable term as well—and sees herself in conversation with Kazmir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, and Ellsworth Kelly.
One of Heilmann's earliest successes as a young painter was her 1972 inclusion in the Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she exhibited a red monochrome piece entitled The Closet, also known as Ties in My Closet. She outlined her process:
When I make a painting, I’m like a kid stacking blocks; I push the shapes around in my mind, I count. It’s a way to begin. I was a potter first, and that’s an activity that also depends upon geometry, a round topological geometry of surfaces and spirals. Then I was a sculptor. I became a painter in the early ‘70s, but my orientation has always been that of someone who builds things.
Mary Heilmann
Mary Heilmann is an American painter based in Manhattan and Bridgehampton in Long Island, New York. She has had solo shows and traveling exhibitions at galleries including 303 Gallery (Manhattan) and Hauser & Wirth in Zurich, Switzerland and at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio and the New Museum on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. She has been cited by many younger artists, particularly women, as being an influential figure.
Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. In 1947 her family moved to Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles she joined her local diving and swimming team, an activity that she devoted herself to until 1953 when her father died of cancer and the family returned to San Francisco.
In 1959 Heilmann enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She recalled that it was “the beach, the surf, the surfers, the great shacky beach houses” which drew her there, an extension of the life she had made for herself in her late teens at San Francisco's North Beach. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in literature and minoring in art, in 1962, she attended San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1963, in the hopes of earning a teaching credential.
While at SFSC she met Ron Nagle, an artist, and began studying ceramics in earnest, having dabbled in the medium while at UCSB. In 1965 she began studying in the master's program in ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, drawn as so many were to the modernist ceramicist Peter Voulkos. While there Heilmann studied not only with Voulkos, but with the sculptor and ceramicist Jim Melchert, and Karl Kasten, a painter and print-maker. During her time at Berkeley Heilmann became friends with the artist Bruce Nauman, who was a student at the University of California, Davis. Naumann introduced Heilmann to his teacher, William T. Wiley, an artist who taught her for a short time.
Heilmann moved to New York City after graduating from Berkeley in 1968. She felt that both her interests and the work she was making (see Ooze, 1967) would find kinship with shows including Dick Bellamy's Arp to Artschwager Show at Noah Goldowski Gallery; Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction at Fischbach Gallery; and the Primary Structures Show at the Jewish Museum. But fellowship was not to be. Heilmann was excluded from a number of shows from the era, with 1969’s Anti-Illusion at the Whitney Museum of American Art being particularly crushing. That rejection led Heilmann away from working in sculpture (see The Big Dipper, 1969) and towards painting. She chose not to embrace the Color Field painting of the moment, and instead produced what she has called a “materials-based sort of conceptual, anti-aesthetic, earth-colored, ironic painting that was often hard to look at.” Her move into painting had her further experimenting with new spontaneous and casual styles, techniques and mediums, bright colors, drips, flatness, and unusual biomorphic geometries. The early paintings were, in her view, devoid of emotional content, possessed of a non-inflected, pure color. For Heilmann the goal was a painting which eschewed craft and seduction, and was instead “tough” and “plain.”
Heilmann places her work in the tradition of geometric painting—though she has also said that “abstraction” is a perfectly suitable term as well—and sees herself in conversation with Kazmir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, and Ellsworth Kelly.
One of Heilmann's earliest successes as a young painter was her 1972 inclusion in the Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she exhibited a red monochrome piece entitled The Closet, also known as Ties in My Closet. She outlined her process:
When I make a painting, I’m like a kid stacking blocks; I push the shapes around in my mind, I count. It’s a way to begin. I was a potter first, and that’s an activity that also depends upon geometry, a round topological geometry of surfaces and spirals. Then I was a sculptor. I became a painter in the early ‘70s, but my orientation has always been that of someone who builds things.