Mary Heilmann
The GAM of Torino
October 30, 2024 – March 16, 2025

The GAM of Torino is pleased to present the first major Italian exhibition dedicated to the American artist Mary Heilmann, born in San Francisco in 1940. The exhibition, curated by Chiara Bertola, director of GAM, was realised in collaboration with the artist and Studio Heilmann of New York.

Mary Heilmann is one of the most important contemporary abstract painters. The exhibition traces the sixty years of her career, from her early geometric paintings of the 1970s to her recent shaped canvases in fluorescent colours. The sixty works in the exhibition illustrate her joyful output and offer a broad look at her playful approach to abstraction, touching on fundamental passages and thematic cores of her oeuvre.

Born in California, Heilmann studied poetry, ceramics, and sculpture before moving to New York in 1968, where, after arriving as a sculptor, she turned to painting in response to the predominance of sculptors among her contemporaries. This exhibition explores Heilmann’s formal approach to painting and abstraction, highlighting the autobiographical themes that run through her work. Her practice overlaps the analytical geometries of minimalism with the spontaneous ethos of the Beat Generation. She is distinguished by her often unorthodox and always explosive approach to colour and form. Her art is influenced by the counterculture of the 1970s, the free speech movement and the surfing spirit of her native California, and even anticipated the Beat culture and the subsequent protest movements against the system.

The simplicity of the forms used by Heilmann is downplayed by a particular nonchalance: the contours are never clearly defined, and this imprecision adds an element of freshness and spontaneity to her work. In some of her works, amorphous forms seem to melt together like liquid wax, creating a fascinating and almost hypnotic visual effect. Heilmann uses colour freely and intuitively: splashes of colour and bleeding edges for no apparent reason are a distinctive feature of her style. This casual approach to painting technique masks a structural complexity that only gradually reveals itself. Her brushstrokes are always perceptible, giving a feeling of immediacy and of the physical presence of the artist’s gesture. Mary Heilmann’s works are a perfect example of how apparent simplicity can conceal unexpected depth and complexity, inviting the viewer to a more careful and reflective exploration.

Each room is designed to evoke the emotion and chromatic ‘sound’ of a specific period, reflecting the artist’s concept: each of my paintings can be seen as an autobiographical marker, a cue, with which I evoke a moment from my past or my projected future.

The exhibition includes the artist’s earliest paintings dating back to the 1970s, among which we find shapes such as squares and grids; works mainly inspired by architectural details from the interiors of studios and friends’ houses. The most historical painting in the exhibition is Chinatown from 1976, which takes its title from the neighbourhood where Heilmann lived her initial years in New York. The influence of modern masters such as Piet Mondrian is evident in works such as French Screen (1978), The Rosetta Stone I (1978) and Robert’s Garden (1983). The exhibition also presents works from the late 1980s to the present day, many of which are inspired by key moments in the artist’s life, bringing out her love for popular culture, music and cinema, which have always influenced and animated Heilmann’s painting. 

The exhibition will feature more recent works with landscapes composed of endless motorway lines lost in the night that evoke road trips, road movies and video games, such as Driving at Night (2016), and some of her latest paintings of only oceanic landscapes crossed by waves, with vivid greens and deep blues that repeat like a mantra reminiscent of the surfing spirit practised in California. Examples of this approach include Pal Al (2011) and Tube at Dusk (2022). There will also be some armchairs designed by the artist, a new edition created especially for GAM.

This first solo exhibition in Italy of Heilmann, whose work is a point of reference for anyone interested in contemporary painting, seeks to underline the proactive and research role that the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino intends to put back at the centre. GAM is committed to promoting the research of those artists whose work – which has become ‘timeless’ – continues to inspire and stimulate new generations of artists and the most curious public. Works that have never arrived in Italy and whose greatness has not been fully appreciated until now; works that have escaped comprehension and whose intelligence has not been grasped, thus remaining ‘timeless’ and ‘out of time’. This is the case with Mary Heilmann’s work, whose power and joyfulness have not been sufficiently experienced ‘live’.

 As stated since the new administration took office, the first Resonance intends to make its fulcrums – the collections, exhibitions and events – vibrate with each other. Today, this is manifested through three exhibitions, the opening of the second floor, the inauguration of the ‘Living Repository’ and the refurbishment of the historical collections. Collections, exhibitions and projects must influence and reinforce each other within an organic design of the Museum’s entire activity.

Mary Heilmann’s casual painting technique conceals a complex structure that gradually reveals itself, just like that of Impressionist paintings. Berthe Morisot’s nineteenth-century revolution of modern life meets Heilmann’s revolutionary modernity, immersed in the light and instants of life of the West Coast. And Maria Morganti’s constant and progressive painting, which keeps track of every moment, step and layer, is the most eloquent counterpoint to the fleetingness of Impressionist colour and light.

The collections, the rearrangement of which has been curated by Chiara Bertola, Elena Volpato and Fabio Cafagna, take into account the stimuli coming from the works and elements suggested by the three exhibitions: painting, light, colour and everyday time. The works in the collections, in this way, find themselves living in subterranean and conceptual interweavings, lying unexpected and outside a chronological line, and bringing out unusual interpretations of customary facts. This approach allows languages to slip into each other, allowing forgotten solutions to surprise again.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that includes texts by Chiara Bertola, Barry Schwabsky and Davide Ferri, a historical text by Mary Heilmann and an updated biographical and bibliographical apparatus. The illustrated part of the catalogue includes images of all works on display in the exhibition, some shots of the installation and some images taken in the Heilmann Studio.

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