MARY HEILMANN

While she is known for her paintings, Mary Heilmann is for the most part a self-taught artist in this medium, having

at the University of California, Santa Barbara, later earning her Master’s in ceramics in 1967 from the University of California, Berkely, where she studied with Peter Voulkos. Although she had visited New York in 1965 and seen MoMA’s seminal show of Op-Art, “The Responsive Eye,” Heilmann did not begin to paint until the 1970’s following her move to SoHo in 1968. Heilmann, now in her 80’s, maintains a strident youthfulness in her practice and has become one of the most important abstract painters of her generation, with wide-ranging influences that are consistently aligned more with popular culture than the history of art, seamlessly combining the West Coast “surf ethos” of her youth with the Beat generation, punk, pop, and street fashion into the playful, storied geometries and forms of her paintings.

The paintings she makes are vivid and unapologetic, reflecting the saturated hues of contemporary media, often having a cartoonish quality to the palate—Heilmann herself has cited the influence of color schemes from TV shows as The Simpsons.

Early success included in 1972 Whitney annual exhibition. has appeared in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1972, 1989, 2008). A retrospective of her work travelled to the New Museum in 2009, and more recently in 2016 as a major survey at the White chapel Gallery in London