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PUBLISHER
Whitechapel Gallery

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.25 x 10.75 in. / 176 pgs / 100 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2016 p. 84   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780854882472 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

"This isn’t your usual abstract art for uptight abstract people. For Heilmann, paintings are things as much as images. They come with personal memories and references. They are objects that things have happened to. They have life in them."

Adrian Searle
The Guardian

  

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures

Edited with text by Lydia Yee. Text by Briony Fer, Mary Heilmann.

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures

Mary Heilmann pioneered the infusion of abstract painting with craft tradition and pop culture

Mary Heilmann studied ceramics and poetry before moving to New York in 1968 and taking up painting. A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from craft traditions and popular culture--especially rock music and California beach culture--Heilmann is one of the most important yet under-recognized artists working today.

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures explores the artist’s approach to abstraction from two distinct but interrelated perspectives: the formal and the personal. The autobiographical dimension of the artist’s work is clear in her pieces related to friendships, memories and places; while the formal aspect of her oeuvre is evident in her paintings of grids and squares rendered in primary colors and in works based on architectural planes.

As well as a new essay by Briony Fer and writings on key works by the artist, the volume features over 100 beautiful full-color illustrations of paintings, works on paper, furniture and ceramics from Heilmann’s five-decade career.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating furniture and sculpture and moved into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

Briony Fer is an art historian who has written extensively on modern and contemporary art. Her research interests have consistently moved between the history of the avant-gardes and the work of contemporary artists, including Gabriel Orozco, Roni Horn, David Batchelor and Tacita Dean. Her books include On Abstract Art (1997), The Infinite Line (2004), and Eva Hesse: Studiowork (2009). She has also organized exhibitions of Eva Hesse’s studiowork as well as, most recently, an exhibition of the work of Gabriel Orozco, accompanied by the monograph Gabriel Orozco: thinking in circles (2013). In spring 2014, she was Kirk Varnedoe Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. She is Professor of History of Art at University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy.?

Featured image is reproduced from Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Evening Standard

Ben Luke

Heilmann’s work has a light touch but the work carries real authority…. She’s a playful painter, dragging her finger through paint, rotating canvases so drips flow in all directions, creating webs of lines, busy blizzards of marks, and calmer fields of colour.

The Guardian

Adrian Searle

Cool and Californian, punky and urban – Mary Heilmann toys irreverently with the more uptight traditions of abstract art to create a new world of pleasure

Aesthetica Magazine

Ashton Chandler Guyatt

It’s hard not to be optimistic when surrounded by Heilmann’s works, they are sincere and effortlessly cool – and a testament of a woman who, during a time when painting was once thought to be dead, brought new life to the medium.

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures

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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/26/2016

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures, Primalon Ballroom

In 2006, Mary Heilmann described her arrival in New York in the late 1960s. "I—who had been a traditional sculptor at school, doing welded steel, bronze casting, and ceramics—immediately switched. I started leaning shapes of plywood against the wall, and fabricating roughly out of fiberglass. When I got to New York and couldn't get any attention for that sort of thing as sculpture, I segued over to a freeform, unstretched kind of painting work… So even though I looked askance at the culture of painting, I chose it as a practice in order to have arguments with people like Robert Smithson." Primalon Ballroom (2002) and this quotation from Lydia Yee's essay are reproduced from Whitechapel Gallery's excellent new monograph, Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures. continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/25/2016

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures, Taste of Honey

How we love Looking at Pictures, the beautiful, generous, and yet not overdone new Mary Heilmann monograph from Whitechapel Gallery. In addition to paintings, the book reproduces works on paper, ceramics and furniture. "It is kind of a philosophical idea, a truth, that any object of art is really made out of all the other objects of art that come before it and at the same time," Heilmann is quoted in Iwona Blazwick's Introduction. "She uses the logic of geometry, plane and seriality to express the organic, the subjective and the lyrical. Geometric abstraction in Heilmann's hands, acts as a membrane with which to capture the spirit of an age." continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/19/2016

Mary Heilmann Launch & Signing at 192 Books

Mary Heilmann Launch & Signing at 192 Books

Join 192 Books TUESDAY, October 25 to celebrate the publication of Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures, the artist's gorgeous new monograph from Whitechapel Gallery. Heilmann will be signing from 7PM onwards!
continue to blog


MARY HEILMANN MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Mary Heilmann: The All Night Movie

MARY HEILMANN: THE ALL NIGHT MOVIE

Primary Information

ISBN: 9781736534656
USD $24.00
| CAN $33

Pub Date: 8/9/2022
Active | In stock


Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures

MARY HEILMANN: LOOKING AT PICTURES

Whitechapel Gallery

ISBN: 9780854882472
USD $45.00
| CAN $60

Pub Date: 8/23/2016
Active | In stock