Mary Heilmann: Water Way – Guild Hall, East Hampton

By RIAD MIAH August 12, 2025

In the spring of 1993, midway through my junior year at the School of Visual Arts, I had the opportunity to study painting with Mary Heilmann. At that time, I was fully immersed in the intellectual pursuit of artmaking, often engrossed in philosophical debates about aesthetics and meaning. I had just finished reading essays on Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman when I approached Mary with a weighty question: “What does transcendence mean?” Her answer was characteristically unexpected and deceptively simple: “It’s when you look at something and it makes you go ‘whooooh’”—accompanied by a shoulder shimmy, as if experiencing a chill. At the time, I was puzzled. I was seeking a metaphysical disquisition; she gave me something else an answer that was closer to a feeling. It took years for me to understand that her answer held just as much insight as the dense theories I had been consuming. It was a lesson in affect rather than analysis, in sensation over semantics.

Mary Heilmann, Water Way, Installation view (photo by Guild Hall)

Guild Hall in East Hampton is presenting Mary Heilmann: Water Way, an expansive exhibition of her work, on view through October 26, 2025. The show presents a mini-retrospective or survey organized around the unifying theme of water, a constant undercurrent in both her life and art. Included are over 40 works, which are dated from the 1980s to the present. The exhibition showcases paintings, works on paper, ceramics, sculptural furniture, and shaped canvases, all radiating her unmistakable visual language: off-kilter geometry, radiant color, and a cultivated casualness that’s as performative as it is painterly.

Mary Heilmann, Lupe, 1987, Oil on canvas, 54” x 54” (photo by Dan Bradica)

One notable characteristic of Heilmann’s work is that it uses double entendres. Its creation is clear, economical, and straightforward. Yet, in their effortless manner, they evoke moments, places, and spaces while maintaining an abstract composition. The work blurs the line between material and sight. On the other hand, the work provides viewers with a window into Heilmann’s signature balance between rigor and play. Her pieces are surprisingly quick, intuitive, and improvisational. The brushstrokes often appear freshly applied, almost as if the paint is still wet. However, this illusion of effortlessness is just that—an illusion and a point of entry. With sustained viewing, one begins to perceive how precisely her decisions are calibrated. She arranges each element—each daub, drip, and drag of the brush—with the skill of someone who knows exactly how to make a surface sing.

Mary Heilmann, Sunset Serape, 2002, Oil on canvas,15” x 12” (photo by Genevieve Hanson)

The title Water Way is a pun, and like much of Heilmann’s work, it carries more than one meaning. It suggests a physical place (a passage of water, perhaps the coastline of East Hampton itself). Still, it also evokes a methodology—a way of being that is fluid, improvisational, and anti-hierarchical. Heilmann's approach aligns with the Zen principle of “wabi-sabi,” which embraces imperfection, transience, and the beauty of things modest and humble. But unlike artists from a directly Eastern philosophical lineage, Heilmann’s practice emerges more from the sensibilities of California cool and the postwar American counterculture. She channels her background, with a beatnik irreverence and surfer’s spontaneity, translating them into painterly form.

Her early life in California is often recognized as a key influence, and rightly so. The colors of the Pacific coast—vivid blues, burnt yellows, and bright greens—remain in her palette. Simultaneously, the flatness and brightness of her compositions recall modernist abstraction while also referencing surfboards, cars, and music. Her move to New York in the early 1970s set her apart from the dominant masculist seriousness of the Minimalist and Conceptual art scenes. Heilmann stood out precisely because she didn’t try to conform. She embraced what could be called a “bad painting” aesthetic (à la Marcia Tucker’s 1978 exhibition at the New Museum, which featured artists such as Joan Brown, Neil Jenney, Judith Linhares, and William Wegman, among others), emphasizing intuition, humor, and personal storytelling. Ultimately, Heilmann created her work on her own terms. 

Mary Heilmann, Untitled Watercolor Study, ca. 1988-1990, Watercolor, crayon, and pencil on paper, 10 ¼” x 7” (photo by Guild Hall)

There is a subtle confidence in her work, knowing how much to say and when to stop. That restraint is where much of her power lies. Throughout the exhibition, one can sense how deeply Heilmann is committed to memory, not as a fixed story but as an emotional structure. Her works are not “about” specific events or locations in the way a realist painting might. Instead, they capture how a moment feels when recalled. A streak of teal may evoke a childhood swim; a grid of squares could hint at a checkerboard table at a roadside diner. Like music, color in Heilmann’s work becomes a trigger for sensory memory. Her practice isn’t about spectacle; it’s about a slow reveal, like waves reaching the shore—never exactly the same, but always familiar. In this way, her work echoes the late paintings of Agnes Martin or the lyrical minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly, yet it’s filtered through a pop-cultural lens that includes cartoons, design, and the West Coast light and space movement.

Mary Heilmann, Blue Sky Spot, 2024, Glazed ceramic,13” x 14” inches. (photo by Genevieve Hanson)

Refusal to conform is evident in her use of irregular forms, particularly in her ceramics, furniture, and shaped canvases. These pieces, featured prominently in Water Way, are not just deviations from rectangular shapes; they are painterly objects in their own right. Her ceramic works—resembling oversized punctuation marks or geological artifacts—hover between painting and sculpture. They seem like painterly gestures brought into three dimensions. Their tactile quality and physical presence make them some of the strongest parts of the exhibition. As light moves across their glazed surfaces, they evoke the shimmer of the sun on water or the surf-polished stones along a beach—intimate, unique, and quietly radiant. And, as Mary would say, they just “cool.” 

Image courtesy of Guild Hall

In a moment when much contemporary art leans heavily on concept, Heilmann’s work reminds us of the pleasures of looking, of feeling, of being caught off guard by color. She invites us into a visual experience that is both sophisticated and unpretentious—what Dave Hickey might have called “the good kind of bad.” And in doing so, she reaffirms the expressive potential of abstraction, not as an esoteric pursuit but as a vital, joyful mode of being.

As I walked through Water Way, I thought again of her definition of transcendence: not a lofty escape into metaphysics, but a chill down the spine—a bodily response to visual grace. That, to me, is what her work achieves. Thank you, Mary, for creating work that makes you go whooooh. WM