Mary Heilmann, Influential Abstract Painter, Dead at 86
Abstract painter Mary Heilmann died at 86 on Friday in Riverhead, New York, due to complications from a fall, according to an Instagram announcement by her studio. Heilmann received her first solo exhibition at a New York museum with a 2008 retrospective at the New Museum (after earlier venues including the Orange County Museum of Art and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston), and critic Dave Hickey wrote in that catalog that she “looted” precedents from geometric abstraction, Color Field painting, and Minimalism. She exhibited in the Whitney Biennial in 1972, 1989, and 2008, and later had widely seen institutional shows including at the Whitney, Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Whitechapel Gallery (London), and Dia Beacon, with a Whitney exhibition closing in January. Born in San Francisco on January 3, 1940, Heilmann was a longtime Hauser & Wirth artist, first showing with the gallery in 1997; Ellsworth Kelly called her “the best of the new abstractionists” around the time of her 2008 New Museum show.
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This story was covered in Legacies Collide: Icons, Influence, and Loss