In celebration of the forthcoming fifth season of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, broadcasting this October on PBS, each week we bring you a video clip from a featured artist’s segment. Up next is artist Mary Heilmann. Read a detailed explanation of Heilmann’s work back on Art21’s blog here.
Mary Heilmann creates abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture, imbuing them with recollections of the real world, stories spun from her imagination, and personal memory. “A body of work starts by daydreaming, imagining, looking at my own work, the work that’s already around in the studio, and also looking at the work on the computer,” she explains.
This video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Fantasy, premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Fantasy features four artists—Heilmann, Cao Fei, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen—whose art defies convention and transports us to unreal worlds and altered states of consciousness. With works at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime, each of these artists pursues a vision first held in the mind’s eye, inventing and re-imagining along the way.
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