It is with great sadness that 303 Gallery and Hauser & Wirth confirm the passing of artist Mary Heilmann, aged 86, on 14 August, 2026 on Long Island, New York. She is survived by her nieces, Ann Jaime and Chris Heilmann, and her nephew, John Heilmann Jr., and their families. She was predeceased by her brother John and his wife Linda. Iwan Wirth, President of Hauser & Wirth, reflected, ‘Manuela, Ursula and I met Mary in the spring of 1994. We were introduced to her by the artist Patty Martori and we started to collect her work right away. Mary also introduced us to other artists she knew and admired like Louise Bourgeois. Our first project with Mary was her book ‘The All Night Movie,’ which is kind of an autobiography as an artist book, and our first show with her came along in 1997, with so many to follow. Mary was really our first love.
Jessica Morgan, Director of the Dia Art Foundation, described Heilmann’s legacy: ‘Mary Heilmann’s work combined formal innovation with a distinctly personal and playful sensibility. Over five decades, she carved out a singular position in contemporary art with her daring balance of rigor and geometry with improvisation and gesture, alongside a palette of vibrant color. This approach has reshaped how we might think about Minimal or Postminimal art—once defined by a severe restraint of color and form. Mary brought joy, emotion, and freedom to her paintings and sculptures and we are proud to have presented her work at Dia not once but twice, recognizing the enduring significance and influence of her practice.’ Mary Heilmann has been celebrated in numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (2015); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany (2013); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York NY (2008) and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach CA (2007). Her ‘Starry Night’ series was on long-term view at Dia Beacon, Beacon NY, from September 2023 through October 2025. ‘Mary Heilmann: Long Line,’ a sight-specific installation comprised of a hand-painted enlargement of her 2020 painting of the same name and a variety of sculptural chairs, was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY, from April 2025 through January 2026. Her work is also included in many prominent international collections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. Additionally, she exhibited at three Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1972, 1989, 2008). The artist received the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award (2006) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In June 2022, Primary Information published a facsimile edition of her highly revered 1999 memoir-monograph, ‘The All Night Movie’ and later that same year, Dia Art Foundation honored Heilmann at its annual fall gala in New York City. Mary Heilmann was the subject of the 2024 documentary ‘Waves, Roads & Hallucinations,’ directed by Matt Creed.
About the artist Born in San Francisco, California, in 1940, Mary Heilmann spent her early years at the nexus of 1960s California counterculture. Exposure to the free speech movement, the Beat Generation and surf culture imbued the young artist with a zeal for community and nonconformity, principles which would become the backbone of her varied and pioneering practice. Though she would establish herself as one of the premier abstract painters of her time, Heilmann’s first artistic experimentations were with ceramics. While earning her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1962) she began taking pottery classes, attracted to the bohemian nature of the local ceramics scene and the physical demands of the medium. Heilmann later enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study ceramics under noted ceramicist Peter Voulkos, who drew on abstract expressionist ideals to probe the conventions of the then-conservative discipline. During her studies, Heilmann mostly created large-scale ceramic sculptures, eventually diversifying her interests to include media such as painted wood, fiberglass, Celotex and Styrofoam. In these formative years, she also gleaned inspiration from the New York School sculptors as well as the developing minimalist and post-minimalist movements. A year after graduating with an MA from University of California, Berkeley in 1967, Heilmann moved to New York. At the time, many critics had confidently proclaimed painting ‘dead,’ a pronouncement that for Heilmann was also a provocation—an invitation to the ever-rebellious artist to explore the medium. Despite having left California, Heilmann retained an unwavering, Didion-esque reverence for the West Coast, which asserted itself through her lush color palettes, imagery of the ocean and a relaxed formal approach. She likened her early paintings, which primarily feature bright acrylic paint, to ‘sculptural material,’ evidence of the way she has continuously incorporated the dimensionality of her early ceramic and sculptural practices into her work. Along these lines, Heilmann often utilized shaped canvases, sometimes pairing together two canvases or creating work across two separated canvases. In doing so, she blurred boundaries between her art and its exhibition space, forging a unique relationship between the two seemingly distinct entities. Her vanguard approach to painting first gained recognition in the early 1970s, when Heilmann’s ‘Ties in My Closet,’ a semifigurative fabric collage and paint work, was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1972 Annual Exhibition. Heilmann further challenged the limits of the medium with her defiantly loose style, an objection to the flat gestures of both color field and hard-edge painting. Interested in forms that lacked definition and contouring, she allowed elements of her compositions to melt or splash into one another. In what she considered one of the most important technical breakthroughs of her career, she experimented with layering controverting painting techniques: a foundational layer, often a gestural composition, covered in parts with masking tape and overpainted with a second layer, often a hard-edge composition. The result, formally and technically original, exemplifies the rapturous freedom that would come to define Heilmann’s oeuvre.
After the passing of close friend and fellow artist Gordon Matta-Clark in 1978, Heilmann left New York briefly for San Francisco, a journey that marked a turning point in her career. When she returned to the East Coast in 1979, she found new meaning in the content of her work: ‘Behind my choices of color, surface, and scale… there is always a memory of a place or event—and through concentrating upon the sense and mood of that memory, I try to let the painting have the feeling that the memory has for me’ she wrote in a 1987 exhibition catalog. Even Heilmann’s non-representational works became increasingly rooted in experiential reference points, such as music, rolling waves, California highways and Manhattan’s Chinatown. These abstractions, often assembled from a simple, although slightly off-kilter, geometric vocabulary of circles, squares, grids and stripes, translated personal and cultural memory into deceptively simple visual forms. This internal shift that drove Heilmann to explore content-focused abstraction was mirrored by a larger shift in the Downtown New York art scene: while she and her peers had once been societal outsiders, she had now become a leader in an increasingly respected facet of the contemporary art world. Heilmann did not consider her work as having progressed in a linear fashion, instead declaring her decades of artmaking ‘all a chunk.’ Heilmann’s individual works were rooted in collective and individual experience, allowing them to jump across time and space, and her approach to being an artist was marked by a similarly joyful unconventionality and pursuit of human connection. She sometimes used titles to ground her work, for example naming paintings after The Drifters’ song ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’ or the universal experience of ‘Driving at Night,’ as a way to connect seemingly opaque abstract works with the familiar. In this way, she oscillated between the hyper-specific and hyper-universal, creating works that can be read on both planes simultaneously. Never one to attend an exhibition alone, she found solace and meaning in contemporary art as a community, one in which she became a pillar and a continuous presence. Heilmann took on countless teaching roles throughout her life, mentoring generations of young people during her time on the faculty of Stony Brook University in New York and two decades teaching art at the School of Visual Arts in New York. During the last years of her life, Heilmann lived primarily in Bridgehampton, New York, an area she had visited regularly since she first arrived to New York in the 1960s and moved to permanently in 2020. Continuing her long love affair with the ocean, she focused many of her later works on water and waves, drawing parallels between East and West Coast landscapes. In 2010 she explained the importance of this enduring image to her work: ‘The one thing that is pan-coastal, all over the world, is the ocean.’
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