Mary Heilmann
To Be Someone
Published on 1. May 2007
Book
Hardback
192 pages
978-3-7913-3821-7 (ISBN)
Description
A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from popular culture and craft traditions, Mary Heilmann is one of the very few female abstract painters of her generation. Her deceptively simple, even off-hand approach to painting - at once expressing ease and complexity - now permeates contemporary abstraction, testifying to her broad influence. Essays by art historian Johanna Burton, critic Dave Hickey, and an interview with Heilmann by Elizabeth Armstrong and artist Al Ruppersberg explore her painting since 1972 as well as key earlier works and her activities in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music. Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition of Heilmann's work, this timely volume also details her impact on successive generations of artists and her substantial role in the revitalisation of abstraction by a new generation of painters.
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Persons
Elizabeth Armstrong, organiser of the exhibition that the volume accompanies, is Deputy Director for Programmes and Chief Curator, Orange County Museum of Art. Johanna Burton is on the faculty of the Graduate Programme in curatorial studies at Bard College. She is the editor of Cindy Sherman. Dave Hickey, a writer of fiction and cultural criticism, teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His critical essays on art have been collected in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy.