Patterns of sensibility - artist Mary Heilmann

Since 1968 Mary Heilmann has created brightly hu canvases that play not on the traditions of abstract painting while resonating with allusions to her possess everyday world.

Mary Heilmann accomplishes abundant in her abstract paintings by means of not appearing to take herself too seriously. In a time when painting and plastic art have long ceased to anchor visual agriculture the lightness and buoyancy of her diction have a tonic effect. Her slam-bang, flow-and-erasure painting proces is instantly seductive. And admitting the abstractness of her imagery grasps narrative closure in abeyance, her work still resonates with allusions to mass-media sources and the shifting spaces of personal memory.

Heilmann's playful spirit combs in her most recent canvases, exhibited last spring at the Pat Hearn Gallery in of recent origin York and last summer in "The severed Mirror," the big painting view in Vienna organized by Kasper Konig and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Heilmann's novel works recombine the various pictorial motifs that have ordered her canvases above the last several years: polka dots, checkerboard patterns, multicolored layers of hot-hu horizontal bands that leave to Mexican blankets (and also inevitably recall the striped paintings of Kenneth Noland), and angled hard-edge lines that delineate shapes reminiscent of Jasper Johns's flagstones. All of these uncompounded bodys are executed in an almost shockingly direct, loosely brushed manner of writing that in less accomplished hands would appear solely sloppy. Her taped-off lines, in a grungy color combination of sour bright virid and black, are particularly funky with the bleeding of the paint beneath the tape left to stand.

from one extremity to the other of her career, Heilmnann has flirted with the notion of painting-as-object by the agency of carrying her image patterns around to the sides of her stretched canvases. This propel almost never works for other artists because it trivializes the picture plane, turning it into wrapping paper. on the other hand Heilmann reworks her surfaces for a like reason often that the sides may commit to a painting two or three stages remov from the not away image. The juxtaposition between the sides and the picture's brow surface is both visual and temporal, and consequently carries an unexpect phenomenological weight. In the last small in number years she has occasionally engageed a shaped format that can be read either as sum of two units interlocking squares or as a larger, single rectangle with square bites taken on the outside of two diagonally opposed corners. freshly she has been ass4m a different pattern and sometimes a different shape to each panel of a diptych. In a certain quantity of of the most surprising novel paintings, she slaps distinct patterns up against individual another like overlapping fabric swatches. These exuberant works continue the interplay of fragment and whole that has been a dynamic in Heilmann's art from the be".

Heilmann grew up in California and came to painting relatively late, after studying literature and clay ware at the University of California at Santa Barbara and then ceramics and statuary with Peter Voulkos in Berkeley. She continues to make ceramics, and the fluidity and translucence of the bright colors in her painting recall not sole her own ceramic glazes on the contrary also the brightly hued mass-market tableware associated with Southwest suburbia. In corporation Heilmann moved in a fast intellectual herd in which there was as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of talk about poetry and cinema as about art. It advances as no surprise that Alain Robbe-Grillet was her favorite author. Robbe-Grillet's organ of sight is filmic, moving like a camera. What may exist as an insignificant fragment in single descriptive passage emerges as a crucial feature in another, as the author shifts and adjusts the field of focus. While painting remains an emphatically different proces from writing and make subordinate to different formal laws, Heilmann's paintings nonetheless tender visual corollaries to Robbe-Grillet's diction of detached, ironic observation.

Almost from the twinkling of an eye she started painting, after she mov to fresh York in 1968, Heilmann's abstractions were based upon drastically simplified fragments of her observable surroundings. With fast, vigorous action s she scraped the patterns of window blinds, French doors and air holes into fluid bodies of glistening, high-keyed primary color. Heilmann called this cluster of canvases the "Jealousy Paintings" - a play upon "jalousie," a colloquial name for window louver or blinds, and also a nod to Robbe-Grillet's novel La Jalousie (Jealousy). In these works, the sensuousness of the slick long trays of paint and the edginess of the title conspire in an ominous eroticism that flow overs the ostensibly minimalist imagery.

As a woman, a West Coast native and a latecomer to the practice of painting, Heilmann was already apt to view the driving mythologies of novel York painting from the perspective of an outsider. The apparent exhaustion of formalist and Abstract-Expressionist paradigms by the agency of the time she arrived returned those traditions even more far It was the perfect twinkling and the perfect vantage point, for reconsidering the collapsed canon of modernist painting.