{"data":{"id":"3559","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":3559,"topgoose_id":3100,"tms_id":3559,"display_name":"Mary Heilmann","sort_name":"Heilmann Mary","display_date":"1940–","begin_date":"1940","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eMary Heilmann’s decision to become a painter in 1970 in New York was, according to the artist, a contrarian move: “I chose it as a practice in order to have arguments with people like \u003ca href=\"/artists/1241\"\u003eRobert Smithson\u003c/a\u003e.” After training in ceramics with the avant-garde ceramicist \u003ca href=\"/artists/1379\"\u003ePeter Voulkos\u003c/a\u003e at Berkeley, she had moved to New York in 1968 and was making large-scale sculpture similar to work by artists she admired, like Smithson. When Heilmann turned to painting, she approached it as a sculptural medium, building up semitransparent layers of paint like a ceramic glaze, and emphasizing the painting as an object by embracing imperfectly stretched canvases and by painting the canvas edges. More than four decades later, these continue to be hallmark features of her work. While Heilmann draws on the traditions of modernist and minimalist painting, she pushes the limits of geometric abstraction by imbuing her compositions with references to everyday objects or experiences. “Behind my choices of color, surface, and scale,” she has said, “there is always a memory of a place or event.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMade up of overlapping shapes in primary colors, \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/10194\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eFrench Screen\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e is emblematic of Heilmann’s 1970s work, in which she was exploring the conceptual attributes of painting. The blue and yellow drips on the red field and the rough edges between shapes invite the viewer to imagine her process and the sequence of the application of paint. The title of the painting playfully challenges the ideal of flatness associated with high-modernist abstraction, suggesting the three-dimensionality and familiarity of a domestic object.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500118772","wikidata_id":"Q1906281","created_at":"2017-08-31T10:21:34.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-31T07:03:46.457-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/3559/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/3559/exhibitions"}}}}