WattsOS
DS
Descending Squares
2018 · Earthenware with glaze
Overall: 32 1/2 × 13 1/2 × 3/4 in. (82.6 × 34.3 × 1.9 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art
WATTS INDEXThe canonical database of visual culture
Mary Heilmann
American, 1940
WA-00033005
Painting
Representation
None documented
3
Institutional Exhibitions
11
Works in Collection
19
Assets Indexed
4
Authority-backed Facts
0
Publications Referenced
70%
Profile Completeness
Cultural Positioning
Influence Graph
No influence edges encoded yet.
Authority Records (3)
Selected Institutional Exhibitions
View all exhibitions →No image
Maps
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1977
No image
Landscape
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1972
Field Verification (4 fields)
3 cross-verified · 1 single-source
- BiographyMoMA· 93%✓
- Birth yearArtsy· 85%✓
- NationalityArtsy· 85%✓
- LocationGallery Hauser· 80%
Source Registry (4)
- Hauser-WirthTier 3 · Scraped/inferred100%
- 303-GalleryTier 3 · Scraped/inferred100%
- SothebysTier 3 · Scraped/inferred100%
- MoMA bulk 2026-05-04Tier 1 · Institutional92%
About
Why this artist matters now
Mary Heilmann is an American painter working in abstraction since the 1970s, known for her gestural use of color and informal compositional strategies that reference both modernist painting and vernacular sources. Her work combines expressive brushwork with a material sensibility rooted in post-war abstraction, often drawing on everyday imagery and the visual language of domestic and natural spaces. Heilmann's paintings resist the rhetoric of systematic abstraction in favor of a more intuitive and personal approach to color relationships and mark-making.
Source: Hauser Wirth · Trust score: 100% · Updated 2mo ago
Graph relationships
Taste overlap and adjacency
Movement
—
Medium
Painting
Related Artists
6 in graph
Institutional
Museum Collections
Canonical record
Artworks (11)
View all 11 artworks →
Artwork sources (4)
11 published of 17 catalogued · 10 with image
- MoMA6 publishedof 12 catalogued9 img
- Cleveland Museum of Art2 published
- Whitney2 published
- Art Institute Chicago1 published1 img
Per-Artwork Provenance Chains (top 2)
2 entries · 1 sources
- 1992 · Cleveland · 1 provUrl Pattern Extraction 2026-05-27·accession_number
- 1986 · Cleveland · 1 provUrl Pattern Extraction 2026-05-27·accession_number
Record
Images
Relationships
6Institutional
Representation & Collections
In collection
Art Institute of Chicago
In collection
Museum of Modern Art
New York, US
In collection
Cleveland Museum of Art
In collection
Whitney Museum of American Art
In collection
Whitney Museum of American Art
Market
Auction sale history
Houses that have sold works by this artist at auction
Record