| Despite a solid and admirable 40-year career, at the age of 68, artist Mary Heilmann is only now garnering the long over-due recognition she deserves. After an August 2007 feature in Vogue, and her unprecedented coup of scoring the November 2007 covers of both Art Forum and Art in America, the 2008 Armory Show honored her by inviting her to be one of their commissioned artists. Her work is among the handful of painting included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and her first major museum retrospective, To Be Someone, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, is currently traveling cross-country, making stops in Houston and Columbus, before arriving at its final destination in September in New York. |  |
Gillian Sneed
Mary Heilmann’s first retrospective To Be Someone is currently on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio through August 3. It travels to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in October.
Mary Heilmann, Cut, 2007. Oil on canvas, 30 x 54 in. Photo credit: Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery.Despite a solid and admirable 40-year career, at the age of 68, artist Mary Heilmann is only now garnering the long over-due recognition she deserves. After an August 2007 feature in Vogue, and her unprecedented coup of scoring the November 2007 covers of both Art Forum and Art in America, the 2008 Armory Show honored her by inviting her to be one of their commissioned artists. Her work is among the handful of painting included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and her first major museum retrospective, To Be Someone, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, is currently traveling cross-country, making stops in Houston and Columbus, before arriving at its final destination in September in New York.
With the recent slew of critically-lauded abstract painting exhibitions in New York galleries (for example, Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Matt Connors at Canada, and Thomas Nozkowski at PaceWildenstein), many critics are proclaiming “the return of abstract painting.” In fact, until recently, abstractionists of a certain age—often dismissed as “painters’ painters”—have toiled for years in relative obscurity. The fact that abstraction never really went anywhere except off the radar, could certainly be attested to by Heilmann, as well as by her male contemporaries, including Martin, 54, and Nozkowski, 64. However, Heilmann is notable not just for being one of few women abstract painters of her generation, but moreover, for being an innovator and a pioneer of postmodernist painting. Moreover, she should also be recognized for having taught and inspired a whole new generation of female painters including Ingrid Calame, Karen Kilimnik, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Monique Prieto, and Jessica Stockholder.
Born and raised in California, she finished her M.A. in 1968 at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied ceramics under the father of the California Funk movement, Peter Voulkos. Her early artistic forays were in process-oriented, Postminimalist sculpture, but her 1969 move to New York coincided with her transformation from sculptor to self-taught painter. This move also signaled the conclusion of her "beatnik-surfer-hippie-chick" phase, an attitude that was nonetheless absorbed into her newly-discovered medium. New York Minimalists such as Donald Judd and Agnes Martin influenced her new fascination with the grid, a structure she could hang her organic shapes on, and one she could ultimately deconstruct. In fact, as Dave Hickey notes in the To Be Someone catalogue, she “began painting canvases as if they were ceramic objects, as if… they were pots, informal domestic accoutrements with no specific shape and no lateral edge.”
Some have described her work as “casual”, “laid-back”, “carefree”, and “playful”, while others have pigeonholed her style as “Feminist” because of her engagement with craft traditions. Such interpretations may be justifiable, but I find that her work transcends these sometimes patronizing descriptions. Is it that she is from “hippy-dippy” California, or is it that she is associated with the often-derided “womanly” decorative arts, that her fine-tuned sophistication and subtlety have been downplayed?
Take for instance a series of related images from 2007, two of which are currently on view at the Whitney Biennial—Cut and Spill—as well as the privately-owned work Stevie’s Rip. All three images aesthetically reference the grid, in this incarnation represented in the form of a black-and-white tiled floor pattern that slopes backwards towards an unseen horizon line. In each piece this quasi-representational/ quasi-abstract motif forms a foundation upon which Heilmann’s formal incursions and disruptions can occur. In Cut, she paints a scrubby, translucent whitewash over the checkered surface, permitting only a craggy, diagonal black line to fully emerge and slash through the composition. In Spill, she initiates the infiltration of a drippy, ebony blob into the picture plane from the top of the composition, as a few deftly splattered white drops dribble onto one of the black rhomboid figures below it. In Stevie’s Rip her signature strata of agitated brushwork—in this case, executed in drenched inky and silvery layers—invade, and ultimately subsume the kitchen floor design beneath it. The resulting effect is reminiscent of an ocean wave crashing upon a beach and dissolving the shore.
In fact, it is no coincidence that Heilmann herself likens "painting a line across canvas with a brush [as] similar to the motion of a wave breaking." Such language expresses a kind of intuitive wisdom that superbly articulates the way in which her images transcend what has often been inaccurately characterized as a slapdash approach to painting. On the contrary, works like the ones mentioned above disclose a meticulous attention to formal and conceptual details. For instance, her move to intentionally confuse the ground of representational space (a floor, connoted by her clever reference to floor tiles), the ground of formal abstraction (a non-figurative pattern), and the physical ground of the surface of the canvas, is exceptionally intellectually astute and visually inventive. Heilmann continues to demonstrate a provocative visual sensibility that remains as relevant and on the vanguard today, as ever before.
