Mary Heilmann

Mary Heilmann is an American painter based in New York City and Bridgehampton, NY.

She has had solo shows and travelling exhibitions at galleries such as 303 Gallery (NY, NY) and Hauser & Wirth (Zurich) and museums including the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH) and the New Museum (NY, NY).

Heilmann has been cited by many younger artists, particularly women, as an influential figure.

Heilmann was born in San Francisco, California, in 1940.

In 1947 her family relocated to Los Angeles, California.

As a high school student in late-1950s San Francisco she experienced the emergence of the Beat poetry and City Lights poetry scene.

While in Los Angeles she became a member of her local diving and swimming team, an activity that she would devote herself to until 1953 when her father died of cancer and the family moved back to San Francisco.

Upon returning Heilmann enrolled in a small Catholic school.

In 1959 Heilmann started at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She recalled that it was “the beach, the surf, the surfers, the great shacky beach houses” that 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, with an art minor, in 1962, Heilmann returned to San Francisco in 1963 to attend San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in the hopes of earning a teaching credential.

While at SFSC she met the artist Ron Nagle and began studying ceramics in earnest, having dabbled in the medium while at UC Santa Barbara.

In 1965 she began 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 she studied not only with Voulkos, but also with the sculptor and ceramicist Jim Melchert, and the painter and print-maker Karl Kasten.

During her time at Berkeley Heilmann became friends with the artist Bruce Nauman, who was in school at University of California, Davis.

Naumann introduced Heilmann to his teacher, the artist William T. Wiley who would also teach Heilmann for a short time.

She felt that both her interests and the work she was making (see Ooze, 1967) would find a kinship with shows like 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 such fellowship was not to be.

Heilmann moved to New York City after graduating from Berkeley in 1968.

Heilmann was excluded from a number of shows from that era, with 1969’s Anti-Illusion at the Whitney Museum of American Art being particularly crushing.

It was this rejection that led Heilmann away from 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 saw her further experiment with new spontaneous and casual styles, techniques and mediums, bright colors, drips, flatness, and unusual biomorphic geometries.

These early paintings were, in her view, devoid of emotional content, possessed of a non-inflected, pure color.

For Heilmann the goal was a painting that 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.

Of her approach to painting, Heilmann said:"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."From 1976 until 1981 Heilmann was a regular in exhibitions at New York’s influential Holly Solomon Gallery, with two solo shows there during that time (1976’s The Vent Series and 1978’s New Paintings).In 1977 Heilmann moved to the neighborhood that is now known as TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal), having previously lived in SoHo and Chinatown.

The “family” that she had formed in New York City—including Matta-Clark, Norman Fisher (who died in 1977), Keith Sonnier, Liza Bear, Jackie Winsor, and Suzie Harris, among others—dispersed after Matta-Clark’s death.

Heilmann returned to San Francisco.

While there she would paint The End, an homage to her friendship with Matta-Clark and Fisher and a requiem for the life she once had in New York City.

But her time there was short, as Gordon Matta-Clark died in August 1978, this was a turning-point moment for Heilmann.

Heilmann said of this time in San Francisco:"Now the work came from a different place. Instead of working out of the dogma of modernist, non-image formalism, I began to see that the choices in the work depended more on the content for their meaning. It was the end of modernism, and though I hadn’t heard the news, the beginning of postmodernism. It was a big minute for me. Everything would be different."Heilmann returned to New York in 1979, the same year she finished Save the Last Dance for Me, a painting that would go onto symbolize a break between the work she made before 1979 and the more mature work she produced after.

However, Heilmann’s return coincided with what she felt was a sort of painting in exile.

Having given up drugs and alcohol after Suzie Harris’s death, Heilmann no longer believed she had a place in New York’s Downtown scene.

Though she would go on to make a number of artistic breakthroughs during this time, notably the painting Rosebud (1983).

It was not until she met the gallerist Pat Hearn in 1986—and her subsequent representation by and show at the gallery later that year—that Heilmann recovered her sense of place in the New York City art world.

With her involvement in the Pat Hearn Gallery and gallery-adjacent world Heilmann discovered a renewed connection to New York City and its Downtown scene.

She became close with the artist Jack Pierson and the gallerist Tom Cugliani.

Her first solo show with Pat Hearn was a success and led to more exhibitions in Europe and Japan.

Heilmann was a part of the Downtown art world’s meteoric rise to respectability.