Mary Heilmann, whose abstract paintings have a spirited looseness to them, has died.
While her work took on the geometric forms of minimalism – circles, squares, grids and stripes – there was nothing stark or particularly ordered about her canvases. Instead lines were invariably rendered with a slight wobble; angles were off-kilter; and and her often lurid-toned paint unevenly applied. Impasto and drips were encouraged on the painting surface to convey the human presence behind the work; a sense of freedom rooted in Heilmann’s formative years amidst California’s surf scene and the counter-culture movement.
Born in San Francisco, her family moved back and forth between the city and Los Angeles. She studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara, meeting Ron Nagle, and learned ceramics, but after a number of early professional rejections she moved into painting. She credits the 1979 work Save the Last Dance for Me – a series of shonky pink rectangles of decreasing size, painted against a black background – as a studio breakthrough, establishing her mature style.
In 1987 she described her painting practice as coming from the mind of a ceramicist and sculptor. ‘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.’
Her career coasted until she showed at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994, and from therein institutional exhibitions became a regular occurence. She showed at the Orange County Museum of Art, California, in 2007; the New Museum in New York in 2008; Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2013; Whitney Museum, New York, in 2015; and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2016.
‘I have always worked from a sort of underdog position and got a lot of energy from that,’ she recalled in 2007. ‘So being “top dog”, now, is a little bit unsettling – I don’t exactly have the moves for that…but I’m gettin’ ‘em!’
