303 Gallery is pleased to announce Breaking Waves, Mary Heilmann’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery since 2005. An intimate, immersive installation brings together paintings, ceramics, and furniture designed by the artist. Heilmann’s immersive environment is geared to evoke conversation and contemplation of one of her most beloved and originative subjects: the ocean.
Water is an enduring theme for the artist, appearing often in imagery and titles throughout her practice. Born in San Francisco, much of Heilmann’s work draws from her lifelong passion for swimming and explores the Californian surf scene. Heilmann moved to New York City in 1968 after completing her Master’s at the University of California, Berkeley. Visiting friends out on the East End of Long Island, Heilmann soon established a studio in Bridgehampton, where she continues to work today: firing ceramics, painting, and daydreaming while listening to the tides.
The horizontal diptych, Line Up (2024), captures a glassy, cresting wave as a sweeping panorama. Lush mint-white seafoam undulates and splits, evoking the movement and pulse of the sea itself. Churning with vibrance, the emerald-green surf in Heilmann’s Barrel (2024) shifts from sheer translucence to inky depths, with marbled swirls and craggy drips of paint tracing the crescent’s curl. Installed alongside the paintings, ceramic tiles dot the gallery walls. Circular plaques, shiny with glaze, evoke still-wet drips of paint in the studio, while rough-edged, converging squares mimic the layered geometries of her canvases.
Heilmann’s colorfully painted and clear-coated wooden furniture invites visitors to allow themselves to relax and settle into the environment. Wood grain shows through alternating panels in one of Heilmann’s signature chairs, Rietveld-Remix #18 (2022), creating a striking color-block effect, while channeling the rippling waves.
Mary Heilmann was born in 1940 in San Francisco, California. She earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1962), and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley (1967). Heilmann has received the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award (2006) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Past major exhibitions include Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Kunst Museum Bonn, Germany (2013); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2008) and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2007), among others. Mary Heilmann’s new site-specific project Long Line (April 9, 2025 – January 19, 2026) celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Whitney Museum’s downtown building and further considers the relationship between the Museum's architecture and the banks of the Hudson River through a new site-specific mural. Her work is currently on view in the exhibition, Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years at New York University’s Grey Art Museum (April 1 – July 19, 2025). A solo exhibition of her work, Water Way, will take place at Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (August 3 – October 26, 2025). Mary Heilmann lives and works in New York and Bridgehampton.
