Mary Heilmann, fearless colourist and singular abstract painter, has died, aged 86

American abstract painter Mary Heilmann died on 14 August at age 86 on Long Island, New York, from “complications from a fall,” according to an announcement by her studio director. Born in San Francisco on 3 January 1940, Heilmann became a fixture of the New York art community after moving to Lower Manhattan in 1968 and later to Bridgehampton in 2020, developing a distinctive practice that merged post-war abstraction, Post-Minimalist sculpture, and craft processes with bright color. Her first major New York institutional show was the 2008–09 New Museum retrospective Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, which traveled to the Orange County Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Wexner Center for the Arts; later solo presentations included the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015) and Dia Beacon (2023). Heilmann studied ceramics at UC Santa Barbara (graduating 1962) and earned an MA at UC Berkeley in 1967 under ceramicist Peter Voulkos, and she was represented by Hauser & Wirth from 1997 and 303 Gallery from 2005.

Read the full article at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events