Mary Heilmann, To be someone

A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from popular culture and craft traditions, Mary Heilmann is one of the very few female abstract painters of her generation. Her deceptively simple, even off-hand approach to painting - at once expressing ease and complexity - now permeates contemporary abstraction, testifying to her broad influence. Essays by art historian Johanna Burton, critic Dave Hickey, and an interview with Heilmann by Elizabeth Armstrong and artist Al Ruppersberg explore her painting since 1972 as well as key earlier works and her activities in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music. Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition of Heilmann's work, this timely volume also details her impact on successive generations of artists and her substantial role in the revitalisation of abstraction by a new generation of painters.