Mary Heilmann

Mary Heilmann's (born 1940) works on paper are suffused with the same sensibility as her influential abstract paintings, a casual playfulness animating a rigorous attention to form and color, resulting in joyful, evocative geometries. Their suggestive power reflects Heilmann's process of what she calls "daydreaming": a conjuring of the sights, sounds and events of past and future travels, the cyclical nature of memory informing her return to various motifs across nearly five decades of work. Edited and with an introduction by curator Alexis Lowry, Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973–2019 includes an essay by art historian Jo Applin and a personal reflection by painter Ilana Savdie, together offering a compelling account of this previously underexamined aspect of Heilmann's practice.

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside a monograph, creating an artist’s book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from her childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships and formative life experiences.
Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book: included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972 to 1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was codesigned with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.
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 sculptures 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.

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.?