Mary Heilmann: Seeing Things, Visions, Waves, and Roads

Visions

After initially studying literature and ceramics, the artist, who grew up on the West Coast, switched not only to New York at the end of the 1960s, but also to painting. Since then, a completely independent repertoire of forms has become her trademark. Her highly individual abstractions are no longer comparable with the classic repertoire of colours and forms of the well-known abstractions that many other artists have oriented themselves towards. Mary Heilmann combines colours and shapes as she sees fit; sometimes red or pink, a cube, a wave or a grid structure. Various interpreters have recognised influences from pop art or jazz, others have discovered a subtle childlike quality or rudiments of Art Informel. Mary Heilmann herself has now brought together ideas and influences in a volume well worth reading, in which she herself provides information, describes her sources and publishes photos. The 6th volume of the Kienbaum Artist's Books thus picks up on the work of an artist who is now also held in high esteem by institutions and whose most recent exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2010 attracted a great deal of attention.