Mary Heilmann is known for her brightly coloured abstract paintings. Inspired by minimalism, road trips, 50s beat culture, colour field painting and autobiographical memoirs, Heilmann's work arose in response to - or perhaps more accurately, in spite of - the artistic circle with which she was affiliated in the 1960s, primarily sculptors such as Bruce Nauman and Richard Sera, Donald Judd and Robert Smithson. Having first trained as a sculptor in her home state of California, she began creating abstract paintings on unusual geometric stretchers in the1960s. Her explosive paintings belie a steely intelligence and a profound philosophical approach. As the artist says,
"I love lines, dots, drippy brushstrokes, polygons, blends, morphs and swirls. I love sticks with stripes on them. Looking at abstract art is for me like doing non-verbal philosophy, symbolic logic or non-number mathematics. It is like music, because it has a narrative without a story, without people: a drama without words."
Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She lives and works in New York.