Visitors to Mary Heilmann’s show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2016 were offered the novel experience of looking at art while scooting about on wheeled wooden chairs. These, too, turned out to be artworks. One, Sunny Chair for the Whitechapel, had been made by Heilmann for the occasion. Rough-hewn from plywood, backed in nylon webbing and painted bright yellow, it seemed happily untidy; as an object, but also as a type. This was true of all the works in Looking at Pictures, and was intentional.
Heilmann, who has died aged 86, had an untidy past as a maker. It was while doing a BA at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1959-62), that she discovered ceramics, which were to occupy her first decade as an artist. The untidiness of her artistic history, however, was to be shaped by more than her choice of materials.
Born in San Francisco, she was the daughter of John, a civil engineer, and Mary (nee Webb), a nurse. Her mother had insisted on continuing to work while raising her two children. She instilled the need for self-sufficiency into her daughter, who trained as a teacher before going to art school.
When Heilmann was seven, her family moved south to Los Angeles. The city’s surf culture attracted her, particularly diving. “I became a fledgling competitive diver at 11,” she told the Guardian in an interview for her Whitechapel show. “A little girl could get a lot of attention diving off the tower at the Coliseum.” As she would discover, though, attention was harder to come by as a female artist.
In 1965, she signed on to a ceramics and sculpture MA at Berkeley, taught by the celebrated ceramicist Peter Voulkos. “He was amazing,” Heilmann recalled. “A super-radical nut-job hippie.”
Voulkos’s huge, abstract expressionist ceramics were on the scale of sculpture, although he had initially trained as a painter. His student would now go the other way, exchanging ceramics for sculpture and then, by the late 1960s, painting.
For all that, Heilmann did not get the kind of attention she had had as a high-board diver, or that male friends such as Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra were now getting as students. “It was the case that girls were very not noticed as artists,” she told an Archives of American Art interviewer in 2022. “There were a lot of really good young women artists, but only a few got any attention.”
This, in part, is what drove her to untidiness. If teachers such as Voulkos overlooked her and her work, she would get their attention “not by being sexy and cute and flirty, but by being provocative and ornery, and then making art that was provocative and ornery”.
In 1968, Heilmann left California for New York, intent on meeting the minimalist artist Donald Judd. (Judd too had made chairs, although his “were not very comfortable”, Heilmann told Vogue magazine. “Mine are.”) Moving into Serra’s former loft in Manhattan’s Tribeca, she was visited by Holly Solomon, a dealer whose eponymous gallery specialised in the work of Californian artists. From 1976, Solomon gave Heilmann a series of shows. The third, in 1979, was a flop.
The problem was pink. In her desire to be ornery, Heilmann had made a series of paintings that defied the colour’s association with femininity – “fluffy dress pink”, as she called it. “Pink is a pretty colour,” Heilmann said, “but it was also a hip, culturally hip, naughty colour, or a rough, rough colour.”
The one she used for her paintings in the 1979 show was assertively naughty and rough – an acid, eye-popping pink offset in each canvas by black. The works, Heilmann said, may have been “playful and sarcastic”, but they were also “very, very serious, and formal, and colourist”, informed by the thinking of the Bauhaus colour theorist Josef Albers. This fact eluded the critic of the Village Voice, who sniffed that the canvases lacked “real muscle”, and that Heilmann “hadn’t been doing her push-ups”. What made this borderline misogynistic attack particularly painful was that the critic was a woman.
Leaving Holly Solomon soon after, Heilmann went to the gallerist Pat Hearn, who gave her a series of exhibitions throughout the late 80s and 90s.
Her life changed when, in 1997, she was taken up by the Swiss kingmakers, Hauser & Wirth. In that year, she had her first international one-woman exhibition in Zurich, at the Zürcher Stiftung für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst. A solo show at the Camden Art Centre in London followed in 2001, and at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2010.
Through all of this, Heilmann and her art proved resistant to tidiness. The earliest pieces in her Whitechapel show, such as Little 9 x 9 (1973), were finger paintings, a method Heilmann had learned when teaching children. She would have a longer career teaching adults, at Stony Brook University on Long Island and then at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “I made the work by squeezing through the paint with my fingers,” she said.
Black Cracky (1990) showed a fascination with breakage, a relic of her life as a ceramicist. That she saw the canvas as an object rather than just a surface – sides and stretcher bars were also painted – she ascribed to having been a sculptor. Her paintings were sculptures, as were her chairs. The blobs that seemed to fly up the gallery wall from the double canvas of Good Vibrations Diptych, Remembering David (2012) recalled “a time in the 60s, the hippy era, when people saw spots flying around due to certain substances that were also flying around,” Heilmann cryptically said.
That she had indulged in those substances herself was just one of her untidinesses. She had, she said, dried out in 1983, although titles of works such as Surfing on Acid (2005) suggested a lingering fascination with the beach and the counterculture it bred. Given all this, her attitude to Catholicism was perhaps even more surprising.
Brought up in a devoutly Catholic household – her brother trained as a priest – she had been sent to schools with names such as the St Rose academy and American Martyrs. The experience never left her. “I loved the whole Catholic culture as a kid, and that’s carried on into my life, the way I make things up now,” she told the documentary channel Art21 in 2009. Her 1983 painting Rosebud was a meditation on the martyrdom of St Sebastian. Another canvas was called Our Lady of the Flowers.
Heilmann spent her last years in Bridgehampton, Long Island. Her brother, John, predeceased her. She is survived by his three children.
• Mary Anne Heilmann, artist, born 3 January 1940; died 14 August 2026
