Mary Heilmann / Blinky Palermo: Mary Blinky Yay!

A tribute to Blinky Palermo!

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940 and began her career as a ceramicist. However, when she moved to New York in 1968, she changed her profession and began painting, developing an abstract visual language that cannot be clearly defined stylistically. Sometimes organic, then geometric abstraction dominated. This hybrid style of painting also reflects Mary Heilmann's life experience, which is expressed in a coded form in her pictures. For example, green and blue waves of colour evoke the long summer on the Pacific beach, while green and yellow bands of colour also appear as spotlights casting light into the darkness of long night drives - two typical ciphers for the early American hippie and drop-out culture, which did not shy away from excessive drug consumption. Mary Heilmann thus combines the narrative with the purely pictorial level and avoids the one-dimensionality of a clearly identifiable statement. She cultivates ambiguity and dialogue, and this allows for a dialogue with other artists. In the case of this catalogue, the artist integrates works by the late Blinky Palermo (1943-1977), whose works she greatly appreciated. A similar sensitivity and undogmatic sovereignty can be observed in his work as in Heilmann's, which is why the book is designed as a kind of homage to Blinky Palermo, who would have turned seventy this year.

Exhibition:
Kunstmuseum Bonn, 11/7-29/9/2013