Mary Heilmann – Geometrics: Waves, Roads, etc.

Info

303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
November 5 – December 19, 2015

Words

“Wryly poking around the history of abstract painting from both within and without it, Heilmann's imaginative approach to the geometries of spaces, things, and thoughts has made her one of the foremost painters of her generation. Adopting waves and roads as inspiration for many of the works in this show, Heilmann's deft perceptive logics suggest simultaneously intimate and expansive experiences.

In Heilmann's paintings, waves and roads each generate their own sources of life. They move and travel and interlock. Positive and negative space inhabit alternating roles, as colours riff on memory in vibrant undulations as well as protracted expanses. Heilmann's geometrics abut forms and steer the eye backward between them and seemingly through them. In San Andreas (2012), a glowing red core pokes through chunks of earthy green glazed ceramic, its tactile surface bubbling with tension. In The Geometry of a Wave, a tiny painting on paper suggests an entire universe in two colours. Pigment pools in the paper's irregular crevices, as a wave's fragile surface is rendered with a penetrating directness.”

—303 Gallery