Mary Heilmann, Playful American Painter, Dies at 86

Mary Heilmann, the American painter known for her playful and formally rigorous abstractions informed by ceramics and sculpture, has died at the age of 86. Her death was announced by her gallery, Hauser & Wirth. Heilmann's career spanned over five decades, marked by a distinctive approach that blended color field painting with a sculptural sensibility. Born in San Francisco, she studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she discovered ceramics, and later earned an MA in ceramics and sculpture at Berkeley under the tutelage of Peter Voulkos. In the late 1960s, she shifted to painting and moved to New York in 1968, where she encountered Donald Judd and was represented by Holly Solomon from 1976. A 1979 show of her 'pink and black' paintings was critically dismissed, but she later gained international recognition through Hauser & Wirth, starting with a 1997 exhibition in Zurich. Her 2016 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London featured her functional wooden chairs as artworks. Heilmann taught at Stony Brook University and the School of Visual Arts. She is survived by her brother's three children.