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Mary Heilmann, “Little 9x9,” 1973, acrylic on canvas, Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland.

 

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‘MARY HEILMANN: TO BE SOMEONE’ AT ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM w/1 cut

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NEWPORT BEACH, CALIF. — From a life that has merged California culture, New York attitude, surfing and the Sex Pistols, Mary Heilmann paints brilliantly colored abstractions with irreverence, style and wit. Her first major retrospective, “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” is open at the Orange County Museum of Art and remains on view through August 12.

The exhibition, curated by OCMA’s Elizabeth Armstrong and set to travel throughout the United States, consists of 86 paintings made over the past 40 years; examples of her ceramics and furniture; as well as her “stream of consciousness” audio-visual presentation, which includes images of her work with recordings of her favorite music.

“Mary’s work has inspired artists from several generations and has played a significant role in the revival of painting for these artists and others,” said Armstrong. “Among the greatest painters of her generation, her retrospective is long overdue and we are excited to showcase this extraordinary body of work.”

Heilmann’s training in ceramics, a material that is both subject and object, may be partly responsible for the inherent physical properties and charge of her paintings of the 1970s. While geometric abstractionists of the period strove for an increasingly “no-hands” look, producing surfaces with a machinelike smoothness, her handwork was baldly apparent.

Working in relative isolation, Heilmann forged her own practice outside the accepted canon of abstract expressionism and color field painting. In a work, entitled “Little 9x9,” 1973, the artist approached painting as if the use of a paintbrush would be too serious a gesture. The seeming spontaneity of this work and its use of a “free-style” grid, which appears to have been scraped out with her fingers or the stub of a paintbrush, became two of the constants in her early oeuvre.

Heilmann’s painting “The End,” 1978, however, signals a change in the work. The large canvas is dominated by a pulsing blood red square smeared onto a field of rich, moody yellow. With its tear-shaped drips of red paint, the square seems to bleed onto the yellow ground with palpable poignancy. The pure visual punch of the painting is deepened by a title that cannot help but make one ponder personal endings.

In the late 1970s, Heilmann accepted teaching position at the San Francisco Art Institute. There she began work on a group of pictures that were profoundly personal. The pop optimism of her earlier work was replaced by the darker sentiment of a subjective and deeply ambivalent soul.

The ensuring years have yielded ever-richer freedoms, depths and surprises in Heilmann’s work. Her palette has continued to expand, and her handling of paint has allowed an increasingly subtle play of virtuosity and seductiveness.

In the past few years, the geometric structure and grids of Heilmann’s earlier paintings have been combined with or overtaken by rolling waves and undulating forms, often accompanied by a fluorescent palette of pink, orange, chartreuse and silver.

“Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 192-page catalog.

Orange County Museum of Art is at 850 San Clemente Drive. For information, 949-759-1122 or www.ocma.net.