Mary Heilmann: Visions, Waves and Roads

Matisse famously said that good art should be like relaxing into a comfortable armchair - but the hard, sharp-edged surfaces of Mary Heilmann's armchairs are anything but comfortable. Assembled from multicoloured, brightly-painted wooden panels, they're objects seemingly designed as much for looking at as for sitting in: a witty, utilitarian riff on the type of blocky, geometric abstraction that also features in her more traditional, wall-mounted paintings - one of any number of abstract tropes which this American artist has been exploring and exploding for over 40 years now.

Indeed, her recent pieces dotting the walls here act like a virtual compendium of different styles and ideas from the past century: from rectilinear, hard-edge permutations of shape and colour, through melting, gestural dribbles and splodges, to webby, organic, cell-like, patterns - all filtered through a poppy, West Coast-derived sensibility that amps up the colours to saturated, plasticky brilliance. The sense is of something sensuous, exhilarating and unfettered, but that occasionally spills over into the vaguely unsettling and slightly sickly - as with her stripes that suddenly buckle and warp, as if trying to slither free from the canvas; or the delirious dots that seem to have spread, rash-like, across an expanse of wall.

The only let-up from this garish abundance is when Heilmann changes her palette - gushing stripes of aqueous blue-greens seem refreshing and cooling, and her application becomes more lithe and liquid. So it's slightly disappointing to learn that these paintings really are simply depictions of waves and water. The subject feels a bit too familiar and unreconstructed, too inherently indulgent; too, in short, comfortable.