Blinds

1975

If the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and 1960s painted to achieve a sublime experience that transcended the ordinary, Mary Heilmann’s work in the subsequent decade played off of this tradition by humorously grounding abstraction in everyday life. Blinds comes from a series of abstract works inspired by the artist’s immediate surroundings, such as air vents, French doors, and window blinds. The work also questions the Renaissance concept of paintings as windows into other worlds by remaining resolutely and irreverently in ours. Heilmann has said that her decision to take up painting in 1968, when most major white male critics labeled the medium “dead,” was a calculated and “antagonistic move.”