303 Gallery in New York opened Geometrics: Waves, Roads, etc., an exhibition of new work by Mary Heilmann, on 5 November 2026. The presentation brings together paintings on canvas and handmade paper, glazed ceramics and a group of the artist's distinctive furniture sculptures. It is the gallery's first show of Heilmann's work since her death in August 2026.

Heilmann showed with 303 Gallery from 2004, and the new exhibition takes two recurring motifs, waves and roads, as its starting point. In her paintings the two forms move, travel and interlock, with positive and negative space trading places and colour working through memory in bright, shifting passages. A glazed ceramic work, San Andreas (2012), sets a glowing red centre against earthy green, while a small painting on paper, The Geometry of a Wave, compresses an entire seascape into two colours.

The installation also includes Heilmann's signature chairs, placed so visitors can sit among the paintings and spend time with them. The arrangement treats looking as a slow, social act: the edges of the paintings point at one another, and the furniture turns the gallery into a place to linger rather than pass through.

Heilmann was one of the most admired abstract painters of her generation, with a career stretching back to the early 1970s. Her work was surveyed in a retrospective that travelled from the Orange County Museum of Art to the New Museum in New York between 2007 and 2009, and she later showed at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2016, the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht and the Whitney Museum in New York, which commissioned a solo presentation for its new building.