Julie Heffernan, Interior Figure with Pink Chair — Early Work, Signed

A fully resolved early oil on canvas by Julie Heffernan, made before the baroque allegorical self-portrait vocabulary that would define her mature career and place her work in twenty-five museum collections worldwide. A partially clothed figure is caught mid-motion — arching forward, head dropped, gripping the back of a vividly painted pink wooden chair — in an interior charged with deep crimsons, dark floral upholstery, and a sweeping white architectural form that anchors the upper half of the canvas and functions as the composition's psychological hinge. The palette is deliberate: warm reds and earth tones enclose the scene while the pink chair — the painting's single cool, saturated note — creates dissonant tension against the surrounding warmth. The figure is in the act of dressing or undressing, caught in a private moment, refusing display entirely. This is the Degas bather tradition filtered through late-1980s New York figuration — observational, psychologically charged, and formally commanding.

Heffernan graduated Yale School of Art in 1985 alongside John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, at the precise moment American figurative painting was reasserting itself against the dominance of abstraction and conceptualism. This canvas belongs to that formation period — gestural, direct, and grounded in classical draftsmanship — before the allegorical program took over. Works from this window of her career almost never appear at auction. This work comes directly from the private collection of Robin Hutchins, owner of Robin Hutchins Gallery, Maplewood, New Jersey, which showed Heffernan's work during her early career. Signed verso; original gallery labels present on stretcher.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Julie Heffernan (b. 1956, Peoria, IL) received her BFA from the University of California Santa Cruz and her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 1985, where she studied alongside John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. She is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University and a 2011 inductee of the National Academy of Design. Since 1999 she has had more than fifty solo exhibitions at museums and venues across the United States and abroad, and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, since 2005. Her work is held in twenty-five museum and institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Norton Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Palmer Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, and Damien Hirst's Murderme Collection, London. Her artwork has been described by writer Rebecca Solnit as "a new kind of history painting" and by The New Yorker as "ironic rococo surrealism with a social-satirical twist."

CONDITION Good. Canvas and paint layer are stable with no visible cracking, lifting, or flaking. Float frame shows light handling wear at corners consistent with age. Minor edge wear at the lower canvas margin possible — examine in hand before shipping.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Overall: 34 1/8" x 24" x 1 5/8"
• Visible: 33.5" x 23.5"
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Frame: Minimalist float frame, natural wood
• Signature: Verso — signed "J. Heffernan"; original gallery labels on stretcher
• Provenance: Ex-collection, owner of Robin Hutchins Gallery, Maplewood, NJ
• Period: Early career, consistent with late 1980s–early 1990s