Floating Tile Tables, (2024)
About the work
Specially commissioned for Manuela, Mary Heilmann’s ‘Floating Tile Tables’ (2024) present a throughline to the artist’s longstanding interest in ceramics, furniture, and what she calls “home arts”. Situated throughout the restaurant’s bar and dining areas, Heilmann’s fifty-one tables exist in three colorways (red, yellow, green), and two shapes (square and round), with a modular design that can be combined to suit a range of groups. As a painter and ceramicist, Heilmann’s playful approach to color and geometric form is evident throughout the works, whose molded inlays are carved and placed with the utmost precision. Each table is topped with a tinted and treated oak surface that has been painstakingly milled on a CNC router to cup around the ceramic panels, which are comprised of grout and tiles. This process was managed by SITU Fabrication, a New York based studio that specializes in executing highly complex millwork projects. The coloured tiles are made by hand, glazed and fired by Powerhouse Arts, a not-for-profit ceramics studio, also based in New York. As the first example of Heilmann’s work designed for a commercial setting, great care has been taken to treat the table’s surfaces with a clear, protective polyurethane layer that enables their form to be married with their function. In 2026, the tables will be auctioned for charity.
About the artist
Mary Heilmann (b.1940, United States) is a contemporary Abstract artist renowned for her joyful, often unorthodox take on Minimalist painting. Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Heilmann completed a degree in literature, before studying ceramics at Berkeley. After moving to New York in 1968, she began to paint. Her career, which spans over five decades, draws inspiration from eccentric counter-cultures; from the Beat poets to California’s surfers,1960s pop music and the hippie movement. ‘Everyday life and art history all join together in my work,’ she says, of the unpretentious style and nuanced color combinations for which she is best known. Heilmann’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.