The works on paper of American artist Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) are suffused with the same sensibility as her influential abstract paintings, a casual playfulness animating a rigorous attention to form and color, resulting in joyful, evocative geometries. Their suggestive power reflects Heilmann’s process of what she calls “daydreaming”: a conjuring of the sights, sounds and events of past and future travels, the cyclical nature of memory informing her return to various motifs across nearly five decades of work. Heilmann’s drawing practice – her “daydraming”, sees the artist experimenting with her signature geometric shapes in various arrangements of color, form and composition.
Edited and with an introduction by curator Alexis Lowry, Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973–2019 includes an essay by art historian Jo Applin and a personal reflection by painter Ilana Savdie, together offering a compelling account of this previously underexamined aspect of Heilmann’s practice.
