CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/26/2016

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures

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.