Mary Heilmann

Mary Heilmann’s abstract paintings, often composed of flowing, transparent colors, echo the images and sounds of her time. Her work alludes to popular culture, literature, film, landscape, fashion, and much more. A mint-green kitchen from the 1950s, the patterns of a Mexican blanket, everyday packaging materials, the mood at a certain time of day – all of these could provide the starting point for a painting. Heilmann sought for her work to have ‘a sense of time and place: current time and place; past time and place; future time and place – each painting to evoke memory and premonition at once.’

Heilmann, who began painting relatively late, having first studied literature, ceramics and sculpture, placed herself within the geometric-abstract tradition of painters such as Mondrian, Reinhardt and Kelly. Her sensitivity to everyday impressions, with little distinction made between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, is also reminiscent of Pop Art. As a painter, however, she was particularly fascinated by the way simple structures can ‘fall into place’, and by how atmosphere and rhythm can emerge from pure geometry.

The organized layout and forcefully painted areas make Laurens of 1986 a very direct painting. Two grey lines divide the work into four equal parts, but the effect is anything but static. The result is almost filmic – as though, within the identical segments, the red and yellow planes are not entirely ‘in focus’. The areas of color moreover seem to be adrift: their positions in relation to the grey grid give rise to a sense of vertical movement.

Over the years, Heilmann’s painting developed from a certain severity into an approach to paint that allowed for greater elegance, virtuosity and seductiveness. Her works appear as lively constructions, anarchic in feeling yet disciplined in form. Or, as an art critic once wrote: ‘More than any other painter working today, Mary Heilmann can make a quickly flicked drip, a loosely brushed smudge or a solitary dollup of color seem like a big event.’