Mary Heilmann’s New Dia Show Places Her among the (Male) Icons of Minimalism
When Mary Heilmann moved to New York in 1968, with a master’s in ceramics from UC Berkeley under her belt, she expected to get noticed for her sculpture.
When Mary Heilmann moved to New York in 1968, with a master’s in ceramics from UC Berkeley under her belt, she expected to get noticed for her sculpture.
Mary Heilmann discusses her exhibition 'Looking at Pictures' at Whitechapel Gallery. Heilmann takes colour, line and shape on unexpected journeys. Polka dots waft across eye-popping hues corralled within irregular rectangles. The poetry of her works lies in the tension between the rigours of geometry and the contingencies of the human and the organic. The surreal beach life of Los Angeles, 1960s counter culture, pop songs and friendships with New York artists, poets and musicians are the well springs of Mary Heilmann’s dazzling abstractions.
Alex Bacon met with David Reed and Mary Heilmann at their exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin to discuss their friendship, the process of putting together a two-person show based on that relationship, and what they’ve learned from doing it. The exhibition is on view until October 11, 2015.
If Mary Heilmann is now mostly known as a painter’s painter, her current retrospective, which inaugurated its four-city tour last spring at the Orange County Museum of Art, makes it clear that this ought to change.