Water Way, Mary Heilmann’s newly opened show at Guild Hall in East Hampton and her first large-scale museum show on Long Island’s East End, is a joyous celebration of 40 years of the artist’s career. The water-themed exhibition includes not only paintings and works on paper but also chairs, a small table, and ceramics, the latter either on its own or incorporated into a painting as in the 2020’s red acrylic Barrel and Tube. Heilmann is a longtime resident of Bridgehampton and her reverence for the ocean reverberates throughout, underpinned by an underground, punk rock/new wave, California surf culture ethos.
Ranging from minimal expressions of the horizon line (Horizon, 1991) to the curvy multicolored bands of Dreamy Waves, 2022, a proximity to the ocean repeatedly makes itself felt. At times, Heilmann adds other elements that emphasize various aspects of waves cresting and breaking, such as the white line of paper mache that dips down over the blue wave shapes in Broken Wave, 2022. Glassy Wall, 2020, is an aqua-colored wave construction of wood and canvas that swings toward the sculptural.
A couple of the more minimal paintings in Water Way—Clear Day, 2020, and Little Green Room, 2015—bring to mind Heilmann’s contemporary Suzan Frecon and her reductive depictions of landscape. Others veer sharply in another direction, where the ocean is shown as a roiling mix of color and movement. The small Untitled Ocean from 2008 is a loose composition of drippy bands of blues, and No Linear Time, 2015, is similarly fluid. Jellyfish, 1997, with its blobs of black and white on a pale blue ground, seems like an outlier in this context, yet its influence on a younger generation—German-born, NY-based artist, Jule Korneffel, who recently exhibited with Heilmann in Amsterdam, for one—is evident.
No Linear Time could have been the subtitle of this show as there seems to be no discernible stylistic direction timewise, but instead, things seem to loop around and then find each other again. The ceramic diamond-shape of Mazatlan from 1980 with its blue bottom half reappears in the aforementioned Horizon from 1991, an oil painting of the identical configuration. Heilmann has been quoted as saying, “My work follows no linear time. It’s all a chunk,” yet her paintings feel consistently vibrant and elemental, conjuring the “timeless sea breezes” of Rilke’s Song of the Sea. She spans the decades with a continuing sense of spontaneity, expanding the nomenclature of geometric abstraction with personal references that jolt the paintings into the realm of everyday experience with the ocean serving as the great uniter.
Mary Heilmann: Water Way
Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY
Curated by Melanie Crader
August 3 — October 26, 2025
About the writer: Amanda Church is a painter and occasional writer living and working in New York City, where she is represented by High Noon Gallery. @mspants21