Mary Heilmann

Mary Heilmann (San Francisco, 1940 – 2026) was an American painter who worked between Manhattan and Bridgehampton, on Long Island. Her work, developed over several decades, made her a highly influential figure for younger painters. Trained in ceramics at Berkeley with Peter Voulkos, she moved to New York in 1968 and, after being excluded from the 1969 Anti-Illusion show at the Whitney Museum, turned from sculpture to painting.

She rejected the Color Field painting fashionable at the time and developed a material-based, ironic work in earthy colors, with biomorphic shapes, drips and flat surfaces, placing herself within the tradition of geometric painting. In 1972 she showed a red monochrome, The Closet, at the Whitney. After Gordon Matta-Clark died in 1978 she returned to San Francisco, and in 1995 she moved her studio to Bridgehampton, where water and the ocean reappeared in her work. Her legacy was consolidated by the retrospective To Be Someone (2007–2008), which placed her in the art historical canon.