Pace Prints is pleased to present Mary Heilmann, a survey of prints, on view September 9 – October 16, 2021. This solo exhibition will spotlight editions made by Heilmann in collaboration with Pace Prints, all of which embody the spirit of experimentation and innovation that the artist has brought to her painting and sculpture. The panoply of print techniques on display encompasses aquatint etching, inkjet print, linocut, pigmented and stenciled handmade paper, and woodcut. Mary Heilmann will be on view at Pace Prints, on the third floor at 521 West 26th Street.
This exhibition tells the story of thirty years of collaboration between Mary Heilmann and the printmakers at Pace Prints. In her most recent projects, created in pigmented and stenciled handmade paper, Heilmann uses the chromatic intensity of pigmented pulp to fuel the minimal forms within her compositions, Serape Mirage (2019) and Stormy Sunset (2020). These newest works rely upon shaped handmade paper. The earliest works in the exhibition, two untitled sets from 1990, similarly rely on the irregular form of handmade paper to create eight-sided overlapping squares or rectangles.
A group of six aquatint etchings display the masked, gauzy, or washed-over color technique found in many of the Heilmann’s paintings from the 1990s and early 2000s. Charm (1994) and Blue Angel (1996) offer bold blocks of color apportioned among washes of white, allowing each block its own space. Mint Print and Mint Boy (1998) are more subdued, with black and white rectangles in a 1960s roadster-inspired mint-green hue. Jazz (2002) and Hiphop (2002), titles that evoke the artist’s affinity for music, are full fields of reverberating, bold color. Each print in the exhibition is joyful, full of rich, brilliant color — terms that apply equally to Heilmann’s own disposition.
Mary Heilmann was born in 1940 in San Francisco, California. She earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1962), and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley (1967). Heilmann’s work has appeared in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1972, 1989, 2008) and is included in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Netherlands, and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017), was a United States Artists Oliver Fellow (2014), has received the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award (2006) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Mary Heilmann lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York and New York City.
Heilmann is represented by Hauser & Wirth and 303 Gallery, New York.