Alida, 1998 Mary Heilmann is often included in exhibitions with artists under 40, though she is over 50 herself.
She was an early admirer of Andy Warhol, and is sometimes referred to as a pioneer of postmodernism in art, but her work has no postmodern abrasiveness.
One critic called it “delightfully vulgar and gaily carnal,” and another complimented the way she “can make a quickly flicked drip, a loosely brushed smudge or a solitary dollop of color seem like a big event.”
The playfulness of the work is perhaps the main reason it is classified as youthful.
October, 1983 Heilmann was born in San Francisco, grew up in Los Angeles, and moved to New York (where she still lives) after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley.
She worked at first as a sculptor, but began painting in the early 1970s, a time when painting, as she says, “was alleged to be dead.”
Looks Like Music, 1999 She taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and exhibited regularly at the Holly Solomon Gallery, and later the Pat Hearn Gallery.
She was included in group shows with titles like “A Debate on Abstraction” and “The Use of Geometry in the 80s”.
Moira, 1998 Most of Heilmann’s paintings have an implied grid beneath them, as does much of the art that has roots in the 1970s.
Heilmann, however, unlike her contemporaries, proceeds with bright colors, a light touch, and a sense of humor. These are some of the reasons she is admired by younger painters.
“I’m not averse to gorgeousness,” she said as she finished work on her prints at Crown Point Press. “I just want it to look like it happened without a struggle.”