Mary Heilmann / Blinky PalermoMary Blinky Yay!

A homage to Blinky Palermo! Mary Heilmann (1940–2026) was born in San Francisco and began her career as a ceramicist. With her move to New York in 1968 she changed métier, took up painting and developed an abstract pictorial language that cannot be pinned down stylistically. At times organic abstraction predominates, at others geometric abstraction. This hybrid manner of painting at the same time reflects Mary Heilmann’s experience of life, which finds encoded expression in the pictures. Green and blue waves of colour, for example, quote the long summer on the beaches of the Pacific, while green and yellow bands of colour appear at the same time as headlamps casting light into the darkness of long night-time drives – two typical ciphers of the early American hippie and drop-out culture, which did not stop short of excessive drug consumption either. Mary Heilmann thus combined the narrative with the purely pictorial level and thereby avoided the one-dimensionality of a clearly identifiable statement. She cultivated ambiguity and a capacity for dialogue, and this permits a conversation with other artists. In the case of this catalogue the artist integrated works by Blinky Palermo (1943–1977), who died young and whose works she greatly admired. A similar sensibility and undogmatic assurance can be observed in his works as in Heilmann’s, which is why the book is conceived as a kind of homage to Blinky Palermo, who would have turned seventy in 2013.

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