Mary Heilmann (b. 1940)

"Mary Heilmann's paintings are the stunningly original and wholly unexpected love child of informality and eloquence. Born from California culture in the 1960s and raised on New York attitude during the 1970s, Mary somehow merges a hippie and punk ethos in her work, and the casual, take-me-or-leave-me attitude of her paintings is spiked with a brazen disregard for anything too high-minded or heavy-handed. No one paints like Mary, not even close, because nobody has dared approach geometric abstraction with such irreverence, style, and wit. With every passing year, her achievement becomes clearer and more pronounced...the case can be made that Mary Heilmann is the foremost American abstract painter working today" (D. Szakacs, Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, exh. cat., New York, 2007, p.7).