303 Gallery presents our first one-person exhibition of paintings by Mary Heilmann.
Mary Heilmann’s paintings are personal in origin. An all-inclusive spirit comes out in her handling of the materials where it is possible for even drips to become main characters in her tales. “Hokusai”, named for the Japanese wood-cut master, is a two panel painting and her largest in several years. One canvas has small red, chartreuse, purple and black rectangles surfacing through a field of white. In the other, a wave form balances the soft geometry of its mate, inspired by the white water that follows a crashing wave. Another diptych pairs a striped panel with a black biomorph, an image seen before in Heilmann’s work. The title, “Cut and Mix”, refers to Dick Hebdige’s book on music re-mixing.
Mary Heilmann has been exhibiting in museums and galleries worldwide since the early 1970's. Her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial in 1989, and she had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art Resource center in 1970. Since then, Heilmann has had one-person exhibitions at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, MA, The San Francisco Art Institute, and the Camden Arts Center, London, U.K. More recently, Heilmann's one person show,” All Tomorrow's Parties", was seen in 2003 at the Secession in Vienna, Austria, while the Douglas Hyde Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, presented "The Architecture of Heaven" in the same year. In 1999, "The All Night Movie”, an autobiographical artists book of Mary Heilmann's was published.
This summer Mary Heilmann's work will be on view in "POPulence" an exhibition curated by David Pagel at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston, TX, which will also travel to the MOCA Cleveland, OH. A major traveling retrospective of Mary Heilmann's career is being organized by the Orange County Museum of Art which will preview in Newport Beach from May 12 - August 26, 2007, and will be seen at the New Museum, in New York, NY in 2008.