An emblem of the obstacles faced by women artists of her generation, she was 67 when her first museum retrospective opened to rave reviews in 2007.
By Mary Heilmann, who was in her 60s when she belatedly achieved wide acclaim for her ebulliently colored, loose-limbed, often lopsided abstract paintings, died on Friday night. She was 86.
Her death, at a hospital in Riverhead, N.Y., was confirmed by Liane Thatcher, her studio manager, who said the cause was complications from a fall a week ago.
Ms. Heilmann’s paintings, which poked fun at the geometric precision favored by her Minimalist colleagues, are easy to recognize. She was a master of the wobbly line, taking the rectilinear grid employed by artists from Piet Mondrian in the 1920s to Sol LeWitt in the ’60s, and skewing and destabilizing it. It was as if she sought to drain Modernism of its lofty concepts and utopian striving and lend it an offhand charm. Some of her most enchanting paintings look as if they if they were done by an artist who had misplaced her T-square and ruler.
Originally trained as a ceramist, Ms. Heilmann favored high-key colors that at times drip and run like glazes on the side of a pot. Her affection for hot pinks and oranges, with their intimations of teenage-girl taste, amounted to its own sly assault on virile dogmas of the past.
“Mary confronted all the macho nonsense of the time with cool confidence,” the artist Laura Owens, a former student of Ms. Heilmann’s, said in an interview. “At a time when painters took their own importance too seriously, Mary doubled down, paradoxically, on the casual gesture.”
Within the art world, Ms. Heilmann was an emblem of the professional obstacles faced by women artists of her generation. “I was such an underdog for so long,” she said without bitterness in an interview with The New York Times in 2008.
That was when her first museum retrospective, modestly titled “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” was about to open at the New Museum in New York.
