CALIFORNIA DREAMING

Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures
[8 June - 21 August 2016 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London

Last week, Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. This exhibition of some fifty paintings, ceramics and sculptures, charts the past 50 years of this American artist’s life, which began in 1940 in Southern California. The sunshine and colours of the Sunshine State permeate her work, despite her moving to New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s where she met and worked with many of the well-known ‘Factory’ artists and musicians of the day.

Heilmann’s early works, the linear sculptures, glossy painted ceramics and large canvases are colourful and geometric in their abstract design. 

The Big Dipper, 1969

The Big Dipper, 1969 is a charming painted non-fired clay sculpture, decorated with silver lead foil and paint which is reminiscent of the flashing lights and loops of an amusement park ride or indeed a shimmering ocean wave crashing onto a shore at night.

Little 9x9, 1973

A practical person, Heilmann studied poetry, ceramics and sculpture in California in the 1950s and early 1960s and then, she says, she abandoned sculpture in favour of painting after she realised that she would be more successful as a woman artist than as a woman sculptor. As time went on, one can see the sculptor in her paintings; Little 9x9, 1973, is a square canvas painted in red and crossed with dark grid lines, which Heilmann may have drawn with her finger, working against any rigid regularity of the flat, two-dimensional plane. 

She brings life and experience to her paintings; The Thief of Baghdad, 1983 is an example of Heilmann’s use of memories, music and film references in her work, to draw out colours, concepts and feelings. In this canvas, coloured, jewel-like rectangles emerge from a dark canvas, in tribute to the epic technicolour film of the same name, that was set in the magical and mysterious East.

Influenced not only by popular culture, the creative and artistic world around her, Heilmann’s work shows great reverence to two artists in particular, Matisse and Mondrian. Could this be the ‘Looking at Pictures’ that the title of the exhibition suggests? Two of Heilmann’s tributes to their work, Little Mondrian, 1985 and Matisse, 1989 see her using similar bold colours as the masters, grid-like colours for Mondrian inspired piece and soft, organic bends for that inspired by Matisse. In each, however, she has added her own bright three-dimantional style of colours and not-quite-straight lines.

Music of the Spheres, 2001 and Crashing Wave, 2011 painted by the artist in later years, sees her fusing the different treatment of form and colour that she explored earlier in her career, to create the vivid and lively style, which is her own. Though Heilmann’s art has shown some shifts in style and emphasis as her eye has turned to the work of great artists or ideas of the time, (‘Looking at Pictures’) her bright, inclusive and generous treatment is unmistakeable, as she expresses the people and places around her, transforming them onto the canvas.

As I visit the gallery, the artist, Mary Heilmann herself sits in the exhibition, on one of the ice-cream coloured chairs that she has designed and had placed in the gallery around her works. Her easy charm and the off-hand manner in which she drops names such as Warhol and Hockney when reminiscing about her time at Berkeley University and in New York, are both endearing and impressive. 


Like the artist herself, Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures will make you smile as the bright colours, cheery shapes and playful lines transport you to this Californian artist’s sunny and uplifting life in pictures.