Mary Heilmann's paintings turn the idea of the "tortured artist" inside out. Her joyful paintings seem effortless and spontaneous. Her grids and stripes are unmeasured. She makes big, blowsy shapes with thinned paint and loose brushwork, with seemingly no attempt to do anything about the resulting drips except to let them have a life of their own. Sometimes she paints over vast tracts of the canvas; other times there's a pentimento or perhaps an image intended to be visible beneath the surface. Lines meander ...
geometrically over the surface, occasionally from canvas to canvas, as many works are composed of multiple canvases.
The artist's palette--huge swaths of hot pink, acidic chartreuse, cool turquoise--would be kitsch in the hands anyone one less adept. Here it's witty and mood elevating. Heilmann maintains the chromatic intensity at a high pitch throughout the exhibition....
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"Ms. Heilmann is a Postmodernist scavenger, but unlike Sherrie Levine and Peter Halley, whose parodic abstractions deconstruct Modernist myths, she takes 20th-century art history as her personal toy box. A kind of painterly Pop artist, she gives vibrant new life to standard forms of 20th-century visual culture. Imagine the Ramones covering Cole Porter."
By Ken Johnson at the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/arts/design/24heil.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&referer=sphere_related_content
help me. this stuff doesn't seem to be much of anything. how wrong am i? it seems, actually, insulting. how wrong am i? it makes me depressed for our culture. what is it? why is it worth looking at or talking about? what do i learn about myself, others, history, the world, science, humanity, or anything? i have pretty colors in my sock drawer. can i be next? i'm a crank now i guess, but What????