Mary Heilmann is an American painter, ceramicist and designer. Her oeuvre has occupied a unique position in the field of contemporary American abstract painting, and on the world stage, from the late 1960s until the present day. Heilmann belongs to a group of abstract painters from the 1960s and 70s – including Blinky Palermo and Ellsworth Kelly – who did not necessarily reflect on the medium itself, but primarily used everyday reality as inspiration for their non-figurative work.
Heilmann enrolled at the University of Santa Barbara in 1959, where she read literature. She subsequently studied poetry and ceramics at the University of Berkeley and graduated in 1967. Immediately afterwards, she moved from California to New York, where, as a ceramicist, she quickly integrated herself into the avant-garde sculpture scene, which included artists such as Richard Serra, Robert Smithson and Dan Flavin. Her three-dimensional work was indebted to the New Sculpture movement that was then in the ascendency, showing close affinities with the work of Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier and Eva Hesse. In 1970, Heilmann switched from sculpture to painting, a medium that had been all but written off during the heyday of conceptual art. Ceramics also continued to play a role in her oeuvre. Heilmann remained somewhat under the artistic radar until the mid-1980s, mainly because of her radical decision to work in seemingly old-fashioned mediums – and this in a metropolis like New York City, which was dominated by avant-garde art movements – and because she was a painting teacher at a Californian art school.
While her paintings and ceramic sculptures are highly eclectic, they are nevertheless typified by bright colours, geometric-abstract motifs, lyrical titles and a preference for smaller formats. These are the hallmarks of Heilmann’s entire oeuvre. Her paintings are art historically important because of their unique relationship to the ideology of abstract modernism. Indeed, classical abstract modernism was invariably associated with timelessness, the metaphysical, the universal and a rupture with the past. Heilmann’s abstract-geometric paintings pierce this ideological seriousness without slipping into ridicule or irony. This distinguishes the artist’s work from mainstream postmodern painting. Heilmann’s canvases display a peculiar attachment to modernist geometric abstraction. She employs similar painterly strategies, but in such a wilfully contrived manner that they never match the ‘level’ of the classical abstract modernists, and thus can only be read as homages to this type of painting.
Paradoxically, Heilmann ‘modernized’ geometric abstraction via her bright, almost fluorescent use of colour and deliberately nonchalant painting style. She also reinserts geometric abstraction into the contemporary reality via her poetic titles, which often refer to contemporary pop and rock songs or concrete, emotional, autobiographical anecdotes. This ‘updating’ of an art-historically important movement in painting – at a time when there was no support for the medium in question – is largely why Mary Heilmann is considered to be one of the most significant contemporary American painters. To this day, she exerts a great influence on a generation of young abstract painters.
