Mary Heilmann, Influential Abstract Painter, Dead at 86

Mary Heilmann, an influential abstract painter who received her first solo exhibition in a New York museum in her 60s, died at 86 on Friday in Riverhead, New York. Her studio announced the news in an Instagram posting, adding that she died “due to complications from a fall.”

Heilmann was a pioneering abstract painter who blended elements from pop culture, craft, and art history with ease and wit. In the catalog for Heilmann’s 2008 retrospective at the New Museum—also her first solo at a New York institution—art critic Dave Hickey wrote, “The canons of geometric abstraction, Color Field painting, and Minimalism are honored in the spirit but not in the letter. In Heilmann’s synthesis, they are straightforwardly looted as available precedents.”

That exhibition had already appeared at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston and received much acclaim. Prior to that show, she had received a survey at the ICA Boston in 1990 and the exhibition “All Tomorrows Parties” at the Vienna Secession in Austria. She had also exhibited in the 1972, 1989, and 2008 editions of the Whitney Biennial.

The New Museum show, however, gained her widespread attention and accolades, leading to a steady parade of exhibitions at institutions like the Whitney, the Bonnefantenmuseum in the Netherlands, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Dia Beacon, and the Whitney (again), which closed in January.

Heilmann has been credited as a major influence on a generation of painters, with Ellsworth Kelly going so far as to say, on the occasion of the 2008 show, that she was “the best of the new abstractionists.” She was also a longtime artist of Hauser & Wirth, having done her first show with the gallery in 1997, just five years after the gallery was founded.

“Manuela, Ursula and I met Mary in the spring of 1994. We were introduced to her by the artist Patty Martori and we started to collect her work right away,” Iwan Wirth, president of Hauser & Wirth, reflected in a statement. “Mary also introduced us to other artists she knew and admired like Louise Bourgeois. Our first project with Mary was her book The All Night Movie, which is kind of an autobiography as an artist book, and our first show with her came along in 1997, with so many to follow. Mary was really our first love.”

Mary Ann Heilmann was born in San Francisco on January 3, 1940. Born to Mary Florence Webb, a nurse, and John Sherman Heilmann, a civil engineer, Heilmann split her childhood between the Bay Area and, after her father took a job building freeways, Los Angeles, by way of El Segundo, a seaside village nearby.

Early on, Heilmann was exposed to the free speech movement, the Beat Generation, and surf culture, all of which made a strong impression on the young artist. She started as a ceramicist, earning her bachelor’s from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1962. She later enrolled at UC Berkeley so that she could study ceramics under Peter Voulkos, who applied Abstract Expressionist ideas to the medium.

After completing her MFA at Berkeley in 1967, Heilmann moved to New York where she began painting, favoring bright acrylic paints and lush color palettes, referring to the works as “sculptural material.” She often blurred the boundary between her artworks and the exhibition space.

She first gained recognition when she was included in the 1972 Whitney Annual Exhibition, the precursor to the Biennial.

“In what she considered one of the most important technical breakthroughs of her career,” Hauser & Wirth has written about that period of Heilmann’s career, “she experimented with layering controverting painting techniques: a foundational layer, often a gestural composition, covered in parts with masking tape and overpainted with a second layer, often a hard-edge composition. The result, formally and technically original, exemplifies the rapturous freedom that would come to define Heilmann’s oeuvre.”

As her work developed in the ’70s and ’80s, Heilmann began transforming personal references like music, waves, California highways, and other symbols into more simple visual forms like circles, squares, and stripes. Works were often titled after a popular song or an experience like Driving at Night in an effort to connect with the audience. Throughout the ’90s and aughts, she moved closer to the center of the art world as her work gained recognition, as well a fellowship from the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. For decades, Heilmann supported her practice as a professor, first at Stony Brook University and later at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

In her twilight years, she lived in Bridgehampton, New York, after visiting the area regularly since the 1960s. Heilmann, who never married or had children, is survived by her nieces, Ann Jaime and Chris Heilmann, her nephew, John Heilmann, Jr., and their families.