November 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
November 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
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This month in Artforum: Surfing on acid? Painter Mary Heilmann catches the “fall line” of postwar abstraction–then flares through its highs and its lows–with her retrospective that goes on view this month at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, after opening last spring at the Orange County Museum of Art. Art historian and critic Anne M. Wagner takes a close look at the artist’s reinvention of color, surface, and pattern, as well as mark, system, and grid; and then Heilmann herself curates an exhibition in the magazine’s pages, “Signs and Wonders,” which ranges from the iconography of Black Flag to the stacked sculptures of Donald Judd.
“If Heilmann [is] a painter’s painter, then so be it. She is also a painter for anyone who has paid attention to the art of the century so recently behind us and who has wondered how and whether painting will manage to keep itself afloat in the century to come.” –Anne M. Wagner
“I came to New York expecting to align myself with the sculptors, like Smithson. . . . I thought I would be part of that gang. Of course, that doesn’t happen so easily. I wasn’t invited into the Smithson/Serra gang. So I switched my practice rather vocally to painting, because they all hated painting.”