Mary Heebner: Intimacies/Intimismos

Edward Cella Art & Architecture is pleased to announce Intimacies/Intimismos, an exhibition of the work of Mary Heebner. The gallery features Heebner’s lush, alluring works on paper that are inspired by the love poems of famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Heebner’s work is also featured in Intimacies: Poems of Love (Harper Collins), a book of Neruda’s poems translated by prominent Neruda scholar Alastair Reid.

Intimacies/Intimismos visually explores Neruda’s presentation of love through Heebner’s delicate, yet powerful display of male and female nudes. Motivated by a visit to Neruda’s former home on Isla Negra, Chile, Heebner enlists watercolor, powdered copper pigment, graphite and acrylic to imbue each drawing with a tactile, skin-like effect. Using a warm palette of Copper, Ochre and Rose, Heebner offers abstract renderings of the human form, as seen through the seductive lens of Neruda’s poetry.
Heebner describes the nature of her work as it relates to Neruda, and how he expressed love in multi-layered, complex ways.

“For Intimacies/Intimismos, I paired this series of paintings with a selection of Pablo Neruda’s poems, which spoke to me of love. Not just desire, not just fleeting, passionate love, but lasting love. I am honored to be able to present my paintings alongside the work of one of the world’s finest poets.”

This keen juxtaposition of poetry and images is what convinced Alastair Reid to use his translations of Neruda’s work in two published collaborations with Heebner, including 2003’s On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea by Pablo Neruda.

Marie Arana, Book Critic at the Washington Post says the following of Heebner’s work:
Heebner’s nudes, rendered on handmade paper in watercolor washes are at once grounded and fragile. Like Neruda’s poetry, they relay what Heebner calls the ‘naked, exposed, and vulnerable’ aspects of love.

Intimacies/Intimismos debuted at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York City in 2009, and is making its West Coast debut at Edward Cella Art & Architecture, located in Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile arts district. Included in the Edward Cella exhibition program is a March 20 lecture at the gallery by Dr. Judy Larson, former director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where she will present an illustrated lecture of the history of women artists in America.

“We are pleased to welcome this unique coupling of Mary’s art and Neruda’s newly translated poetry,” said Edward Cella, Director of Edward Cella Art & Architecture. “Her work acts as a tangible and fitting companion to Neruda’s words.”

Mary Heebner has distinguished herself as both an abstract painter and book artist, with pieces held in the J.P. Getty Research Center, The New York Public Library, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Harvard University, among others. Her paintings have been published in two books of Pablo Neruda’s poetry -- On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea by Pablo Neruda and Intimacies/Intimismos: Poems of Love. In 2006, Heebner was honored with a solo exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum.

Public Exhibition Program:

Illustrated Lecture:
How Women Have Shaped and Influenced Modern Art in America
Dr. Judy Larson, director of the Westmont Museum of Art
Saturday, March 20, 2010, 4 to 6 pm

Dr. Judy Larson, director of the Westmont Museum of Art at Westmont College and former director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) will be giving an illustrated lecture of the history of women artists and patrons in America in the 20th Century.

Larson worked at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art while earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in art history at UCLA. She completed a doctorate at the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University, Atlanta, in 1998. Larson served fifteen years as curator of American Art at the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia and five years as Executive Director of the National Museum of Women in the Art in Washington, D.C.

Bilingual Poetry Reading: Neruda Intimacies: Poems of Love
Neruda scholar Enrico Mario Santí and featured book artist Mary Heebner
Saturday, April 3, 2010, 4 to 6 pm

Enrico Mario Santí, pursued his undergraduate studies in Latin American Literature at Vanderbilt University. He received his M.A. and PhD at Yale, where he studied with Emir Rodríguez Monegal. He has taught at many prestigious institutions including Duke University, Cornell University and Georgetown University, where he instructed Latin American and Romance Studies, and Comparative Literature. He was awarded the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award and the Guggenheim Fellowship the same year he published his first book Pablo Neruda: The Poetics of Prophecy.

Having authored or edited more than seventeen books, Santí is the current William T. Bryan Endowed Chair of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. He is the closest scholar to collaborate with Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize laureate from Mexico and is now at work on an intellectual biography of Paz, to be published by Harvard University Press.