Willy Heeks is a painter known for works that are intricately layered with bold swathes of color and stenciled forms that seep out of the background. In his monotypes published at Aurobora, Heeks uses the intaglio press to create soft, spongy backdrops for his stencil forms that simmer in their own bold colors as they surface into the foreground of each composition.
In these works on paper, Heeks employed found items from an abandoned construction site as stencil forms to undergrid his compositions. Flourescent spray paint and white primer were used to set forms –through mesh wire, chainlink, twisted cords — onto a Plexiglas matrix. Heeks then inked, surface wiped, and printed image over image increasing visual information. Heeks then would further embellish each monotype with added handwork allowing inks, watercolors, and chaotic brush strokes to have their own way with the surfaces of these monotypes.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
BP America, Cleveland, OH; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, NY; Corcoran Gallery Art, Washington DC; Dow Jones, Inc., New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; NYNEX, White Plains, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; Progressive Corporation, Shaker Heights, OH; Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ; Quad Graphics, Suffix, WI; Reader’s Digest, Pleasantville, NY; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ; University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ; William Sonoma, Inc., San Francisco, CA
