This spring Nürnberg's Neues Museum invited Mary Heilmann to mount a show of recent work and she called it Good Vibrations. The artist was born in 1940 in San Francisco, establishing a reputation for herself in the New York of the late 1960s, where she can still be found these many decades later laboring away at minimal shapes in clashing neons.
Impossible not to notice the happy family resemblance to Heilmann's German contemporaries Blinky Palermo (1943-1977) and Imi Knoebel (born 1940). All three discover their pictorial vocabulary inside some imaginary child's toy box, then set about the heavy-duty grown-up labor of transubstantiation.
