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.

"One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small / And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all / Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall..." —Jefferson Airplane

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, 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

ⁱElizabeth Armstrong, Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, 2007, p. 28.

ⁱⁱDennis Szakacs, Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, exh. cat., New York, 2007, p.7.
- 來源
  紐約303畫廊
  現藏者於2006年購自上述來源
- 過往展覽
  Newport Beach, Orange County Museum of Art, Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone, May 20–August 26, 2007, no. 66, p. 149 (illustrated)
  Omaha, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Borderland Abstraction, January 22–May 8, 2010
- 文學
  Roberta Smith, "The Week Ahead," The New York Times, May 13, 2007 (illustrated)
  "Calendar," Daily Pilot - Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2007 (illustrated)
  Richard Chang, “This Week’s Best Bets: Visual Art,” The Orange County Register, May 27, 2007, online (illustrated)
  O.C. Post, May 28, 2007 (illustrated)
  Lauri Mendenhall, "Variations on a Theme," Coast Magazine, May 2007, p. 162 (illustrated)
  Richard Chang, “Colorful, playful Exhibit at OCMA” The Orange County Register, June 3, 2007, online (illustrated)
  Richard Chang, "Something about Mary," The Orange County Register, June 3, 2007, p. 1 (illustrated)
  Edward Goldman, "Art Talk," KCRW.com, July 10, 2007 (illustrated)
  Art Ltd, July 2007 (illustrated)
  ARTScene, July/August 2007 (illustrated)
  "Continuing and Recommended Exhibitions," ARTScenecal.com, July/August 2007 (illustrated)
  Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, "Finally, Somebody," Artnet Magazine, August 8, 2007, online (illustrated)
  The Jones Report, Spring/Summer 2007 (illustrated)
  Mike Rogers, "Mary Heilmann," Art US, Summer 2007, n.p. (illustrated)
  Vonn Sumner, "It's A Man's World...Not!," Artillery, September 2007, p. 22 (illustrated)
  Peter Plagens, “Mary Heilmann: Coloring Outside the Lines,” Art in America, November 2007, p. 175 (illustrated)
  Dorothy Spears, "Swimming with the Big Fish at Last," The New York Times, October 5, 2008, online (illustrated)
  "Mary Heilmann's Winding, Abstract Road to Success," International Herald Tribune, October 6, 2008 (illustrated)
  Dorothy Spears, "Geometric Abstracts by Mary Heilmann," The New York Times, October 8, 2008, online (illustrated)
  Whitney Biennial 2008, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2008, p. 152 (illustrated)
  Suzanne Hudson, “About the Artist: Mary Heilmann,” Whitney Museum of American Art: Whitney Biennial 2008, 2008, online
  Wesley Miller, “Meet the Season 5 Artist: Mary Heilmann,” Art21, July 23, 2009, online (illustrated)
  Michael J. Krainak, "Border Crossings: Bemis exhibit explores beyond the margins of contemporary abstract art," The Reader, February 4, 2010, p. 26 (illustrated)
  ALICE im Wunderland der Kunst, exh. cat., Galerie der Gegenwart der Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2012, p. 24 (illustrated)

美國中西部私人收藏

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瑪麗．赫爾曼

《去問愛麗絲》

款識：MH 06（畫布邊緣）GO ASK ALICE MHEILMANN 2006（內框）
油彩畫布
36 1/8 x 48 1/8 英吋（91.8 x 122.2 公分）
2006年作

Full Cataloguing

估價
$70,000 - 100,000

成交價$88,900

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NEW NOW: 現代及當代藝術

紐約拍賣 2024年9月25日

NEW NOW: 現代及當代藝術

紐約拍賣 2024年9月25日

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過往展覽

文學

20

瑪麗．赫爾曼

《去問愛麗絲》

NEW NOW: 現代及當代藝術