Two By Two marks the first joint exhibition of New York-based artists Mary Heilmann (b. 1940, San Francisco) and David Reed (b. 1946, San Diego). The show has been conceived specially for Hamburger Bahnhof and presents forty paintings and installative works created since the 1970s.
Both artists are key figures in American painting post-Abstract Expressionism. In the early 1970s they re-established abstract painting outside its traditional boundaries between figuration and abstraction and embraced narrative and emotion.
Mary Heilmann, who trained as a sculptress, investigates gaps and blind spots in modernism’s world view. She infuses her oeuvre with personal memories not only through her dialogue with the works and stylistic principles of abstraction, but also through her choice of titles, which evoke associations and reminiscences. Heilmann’s formal vocabulary references that of De Stijl, Constructivism and Minimal Art.