Painted in 2006, Mary Heilmann’s Go Ask Alice puts an irreverent twist on geometric abstraction. Organic dripping forms spill onto a strict grid, with punchy reds and oranges sidled up against arresting yellows and vivid greens. While the multicolored grid appears to recede into space, the layered drips insist upon the flatness of the painting’s surface.
Currently based in New York, Heilmann grew up amidst the surfer culture and Beatnik attitude of 1960s San Francisco, imbuing her paintings with a Californian ease and a countercultural edge. As a West Coast transplant, Heilmann’s work has always stood out in the New York art scene: as curator Elizabeth Armstrong writes of her oeuvre, “...Unlike the polished, worked surfaces of her contemporaries, Heilmann’s paintings had maintained their laid-back, brushy quality and sense of whimsy.”i Far from cold and academic, Go Ask Alice evokes a playful mood and sly sense of rebellion against rigid geometric confines.
Equally bicoastal as its creator, Go Ask Alice has been exhibited across the nation. First included in Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, the artist’s 2007 retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art, this exhibition subsequently traveled onwards to the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. A few years later, in 2010, the painting was featured in Borderland Abstraction at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.
As with many of Heilmann’s works, the title of Go Ask Alice references a pop culture touchstone of the artist’s early years. The phrase is in fact taken from the lyrics of the 1967 song “White Rabbit” by iconic San Francisco rock band Jefferson Airplane, which in turn draws upon Lewis Carroll’s classic story of Alice in Wonderland. In “White Rabbit,” frontwoman Grace Slick uses the surreal imagery of Alice’s adventures to illustrate the effects of taking hallucinogenic drugs: “Go ask Alice / when she’s ten feet tall.” Go Ask Alice creates a similar sense of visual distortion and disorientation, as Heilmann deploys psychedelic colors to simultaneously convey flatness and illusionistic depth.
Ultimately, by calling upon her Bay Area upbringing, her many years in the New York art milieu, and personally significant pop culture references, Mary Heilmann forges her own path which both honors and diverges from the rich history of abstract painting. Dennis Szakacs, former director of the Orange County Museum of Art and current director of the New Museum, perhaps put it best in his introduction to the catalogue for Heilmann’s retrospective: “No one paints like Mary, not even close, because nobody has dared approach geometric abstraction with such irreverence, style, and wit.”ii