I An exhibition of U.S artist Mary Heilmann will be held at the Camden Arts Centre in London from April 6th to June 3rd 2001. Mary Heilmann makes lush, abstract paintings. This first solo exhibition of her work in Britain features recent works together with key pieces from earlier in her career. Within the simple structures of her compositions, Heilmann plays on the tensions between order and disorder, opulence and austerity, expressiveness and restraint.
Forms fracture, dissolve and engulf the formality of the minimalist grid.
Instead of banishing meaning from her work, she has developed a unique way for abstract painting to embrace the cultural and the personal. Mary Heilmann initially studied ceramics and writing in San Francisco and Berkeley in the early 1960s before moving to New York in 1968 where she began making sculptures and then paintings. Always challenging what is considered to be appropriate or fashionable in art practice, Heilmann s decision to become a painter came at a time when painting was being denigrated by a large portion of the art world. The spatial play of forms overlapping or abutting adjacently are distinctly sculptural. Mary Heilmann was born in San Fransisco in 1940 and currently lives and works in New York.