Willy Heeks grew up and was educated in Rhode Island.
The formal elements of Heeks' abstract images, difficult to pin down in words, transform from painting to painting, from dark to light, surface to atmosphere, sobriety to exuberance, containment to expansion. Due to the ambiguity of repetition, Heeks works embody contradictions, both physical and psychological, in the experience of actual events.
Heeks was awarded the Lois Comfort Tiffany Award, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and Several Fellowships including three from the National Endowment. The Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio have recently acquired his work. He is also in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, among others.
Bright, quirky shapes and playful lines hover over romantic ethereal spaces, referencing nature and hinting at narrative that quickly dissolves in Heeks' work. With his practiced hand, an underlying framework grounds the chaotic, variegated marks, and this structure balances the gestural abstraction and forms in these weighty, elaborate compositions.
STUDIO-f monoprints completed in1998 by Heeks have a subtle tension created by the use of stencil patterns alluding to iron–work balcony tracery, dragons, leaves, chains, disks, bubbles, holes or planets. Complex color harmonies, gold and intense hues, contrast with muted tones. Dynamic negative shapes create an appearance of dream fragments on these rich surfaces.
Heeks continues to have his studio in Rhode Island.
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