Mary Heilmann

Mary Heilmann’s first solo show at the New Museum in New York is also a retrospective. The exhibition includes a selection of her earliest paintings from the 1970s that marked her transition to painting from ceramic and sculptural work—as well as a combination of more recent paintings, carefully constructed chairs and a smattering of ceramic works.

The inclusion of the ceramic pieces highlights an important influence in Heilmann’s practice. Her studies in ceramics with Peter Voulkos at the University of California at Berkeley introduced her to a medium that was inherently tactile. That tactility never left her work. The way she uses paint is consistent with the way ceramicists use glazes: there is a feeling of grit, of pigment suspended within a bonding medium. Heilmann doesn’t smooth things out as a painter would when trying to cover a surface with a solid colour. Instead, she massages out the paint, leaving traces of her hand. In a conversation with Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum, she said, “When I went into painting, I really came in with a sculptor’s attitude and used paint in a way that you use the clay. I thought of it as a physical thing.”

In Blue and White Squares, a separate blue rectangle and square sit side by side on a white ground. The colours do a lot of work: the deep blue is thinly applied but still draws away all the light; the white is lofty, ghosting over areas previously occupied by the blue geometric shapes. The colours hold the image, making both the edges sharp and the squares pop, but the paint handling inserts its own personality. Below the blue squares are painterly drips of the same colour, which are surprising given the feeling of precision suggested by the heavy, solid squares. The drips, which seem like afterthoughts, remind you that the squares were made by moving a brush around, by painting. Heilmann’s brush handling is even more evident where the white overrides and edits the blue squares that had once covered a larger area.

Editing by painting over, often with white, is a strategy to which Heilmann readily returns. In Neo Noir, she paints over larger squares and rectangles of red, orange, yellow, blue and pink with a deep, dark blue. The procedure leaves a wonky grid of small, illuminated windows in the night.

Tomma Abts, a contemporary abstract painter from the uk , also uses painting over as an editing strategy, but in her work the technique leaves only slightly embossed edges as evidence there was something underneath. Heilmann’s approach is more directly transparent. Unapologetically, she makes all her decisions evident to the viewer. They appear neither as good nor bad decisions; instead, they add to a sense of visual tension. This is not high drama but rather small, troubling inconsistencies. The hard-edged lines and squares seem as though they should be solid, straight and square fields of colour, but they aren’t. Heilmann’s hand is irrepressible; every mark she makes is imbued with a sense of the intimate and the personal. This sense of editing, of honing really, contributes to the works’ subtle tension. We see where she paints over, but we don’t see things getting neater or straighter. The idiosyncratic and the slightly off square is left as a record of a moment. In a spirit of the oneoff, she allows for those moments when the brush wanders.

Heilmann’s newer paintings, such as Surfing on Acid, Winter Surf, San Francisco and Carmelita, retain this spirit, but she changes the strategies somewhat. Straightedged lines are traded in for more amorphous stacked shapes. The effect is to create a striated ground, or sky, with undulating dips, peaks and drips. These forms echo the brush strokes that create them rather than fence them in as happened with the squares. The colour in the newer work—hot pinks and bright lime greens—has been taken up a notch or two and speaks more directly to a sense of “Pop culture.” At first glance, the colour seems to be the simplified palette used in educational materials, but there is something more complex. They are consistently one hue or one tone off from what we expect, which leaves pop culture reference only felt and not specific.

Mary Heilmann takes on painting in a courageous way. She sets the stakes high, where one misstep, one colour or compositional choice could bring the whole enterprise tumbling down. Yet time and again, in each and every piece, she pulls it off, making her an ideal, a painter’s painter. ❚

“Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, was exhibited at the New Museum, New York, from October 22, 2008, to January 26, 2009.

Katie Brennan is a painter who currently lives in Guelph.