Mary Heilmann’s Idiosyncratic, Rhymthic Abstractions Find Their Place In the Sun

Mary Heilmann’s idiosyncratic, rhymthic abstractions—and chairs—find their place in the sun.

- Linda Yablonsky

Some little girls want to be movie stars, some long to be prima ballerinas. Not Mary Heilmann. As a child, she prayed for sainthood. “I used to dream that I was thrown to lions in the Coliseum,” said the artist. “Then I’d get to fly up to heaven to hang out with God, while all these people were cheering.”

Over the last five decades, Heilmann has been thrown to art-world lions—and rattled their cages as well—without having to suffer the depredations of a martyr. If canonization still eludes Heilmann, who is now 76, she is nonetheless a hero to younger artists, like Laura Owens, Jessica Stockholder, and even Martin Creed, for whom she embodies the rewards of going your own way, whatever the odds. And she can feel cheered by the major career survey opening June 8 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

During a recent visit to her loft in lower Manhattan, she scoffed at her current status as a “big-deal artist,” while acknowledging the positive effects of growing up Irish Catholic and believing she could never be good enough to escape damnation. “It was very masochistic,” she said. “Punishment. Suffering. It worked for me.”

So it did. Here is an artist who has evolved from a self-sabotaging, socially awkward poetry student and teacher to a risk-taker who picked up throwing pots and then taught herself to paint at a time when painting—especially abstract painting—was completely out of favor.

I’VE BEEN LOOKING AT Heilmann’s art for years— her early sculpture, her ceramics, and her loosey-goosey abstractions—but until she mentioned it, I never registered the religious iconography hiding there in plain sight.