“I like that you can take [space] apart and put [it] together like puzzles. It makes it living and alive.” 

—Mary Heilmann

Inspired by her 2011 painting Malevich Spin, Mary Heilmann’s colorful, three-dimensional multiple Geometric Spin offers a new iteration of her ode to Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich, taking the Suprematist’s hard-lined approach to minimalist abstraction and effusing if with her own chromatic joy and nonchalance. In her own words, Heilmann described herself as being “in a Malevich phase… which has meant a lot of deep thinking about geometry and pushing geometric figures around in a sort of puzzle-making way.” Geometric Spin embodies this way of thinking, offering a sense of movement, or spinning, not through physical manipulation but through geometry – the presentation of her rectangular forms, with their exuberant, poppy colors, beckon to be rearranged in your mind, moving the pieces around.ⁱ

Geometric Spin arose through Heilmann’s collaboration with the art editions program of The Glass House, the historic modern home in New Canaan, Connecticut where its architect, Philip Johnson, lived from 1949 until his death in 2005. Like Heilmann, Johnson held an affinity for Malevich: the architect and his longtime partner David Whitney collected his work, and his compositions inspired aspects of the house’s surrounding design, including back gardens and a swimming pool. With relation to the Glass House, Heilmann’s own take on Malevich’s artistic philosophies evokes the minimalist geometries incorporated in its brick floor plan and its compositional relationship to its guest house. As such, Geometric Spin represents a dialogue between greats of Modernism that spans from early 20^th century Russian avant-garde, to mid-century American architectural design, to Heilmann’s eccentric, contemporary abstraction. 

ⁱ Lauren O’Neill-Butler, “Mary Heilmann,” Artforum, February 20, 2012, online.