Mary HeilmannSeeing Things, Visions, Waves, and Roads

Having first studied literature and ceramics, Mary Heilmann (1940–2026), who grew up on the West Coast, moved at the end of the 1960s not only to New York but also to painting. Since then a wholly independent repertoire of forms has become her hallmark. Her thoroughly idiosyncratic abstractions can no longer be compared with the classical repertoire of colour and form of the familiar abstractions on which many other artists have modelled themselves. Mary Heilmann assembled colours and forms as she saws fitting: now red or pink, a cube, a wave or a grid structure. Various commentators have identified influences of Pop Art or Jazz in this, others have discovered the subtly childlike in it, or vestiges of Art Informel. Mary Heilmann herself brought ideas and influences together in a volume well worth reading, in which she gave her own account, described her sources and published photographs. This sixth volume of the Kienbaum Artists’ Books thus takes up the work of an artist who is also held in high esteem by institutions.