Heaven

Mary HeilmannWW-2004-101150

2004·Oil on canvas·190.5 × 152.4 cm (75 × 60 in.)

<p>Mary Heilmann is known for brightly colored, loosely geometric, abstract canvases that are influenced by personal experience, such as her childhood in California and her interest in music. More typical works are inspired by modernist compositional devices like a grid. Her paintings always include, to some degree, deliberate experimental alterations such as messy drips, rogue brushstrokes, and unexpected color combinations. Here these attributes predominate. Evincing an unusual freedom of lyrical and light gestures, Heaven is an exceptional work in Heilmann’s oeuvre. It is intended, in part, as an homage to the artist Joan Mitchell (whose <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artworks/86385"><em>City Landscape</em></a> is on view upstairs, in Gallery 289).</p>

Catalogue

Year: 2004
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 190.5 × 152.4 cm (75 × 60 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Mary Heilmann

Artist

Mary Heilmann

Painting

Mary Heilmann is an American painter working in abstraction since the 1970s, known for her gestural use of color and informal compositional strategies that reference both modernist painting and vernacular sources. Her work combines expressive brushwork with a material sensibility rooted in post-war abstraction, often drawing on everyday imagery and the visual language of domestic and natural spaces. Heilmann's paintings resist the rhetoric of systematic abstraction in favor of a more intuitive and personal approach to color relationships and mark-making.

New York, NY, USA

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