This video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Fantasy premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings).

Fantasy presents four artists—Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen—whose hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime works transport us to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness.

Mary Heilmann was born in 1940 in San Francisco, California; she lives and works in New York. For every piece of Heilmann’s work—abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture—there is a backstory. Imbued with recollections, stories spun from her imagination, and references to music, aesthetic influences, and dreams, her paintings are like meditations or icons. Her expert and sometimes surprising treatment of paint (alternately diaphanous and goopy) complements a keen sense of color that glories in the hues and light that emanate from her laptop, and finds inspiration in the saturated colors of TV cartoons such as The Simpsons. Her compositions are often hybrid spatial environments that juxtapose two- and three-dimensional renderings in a single frame, join several canvases into new works, or create diptychs of paintings and photographs in the form of prints, slideshows, and videos. Heilmann sometimes installs her paintings alongside chairs and benches that she builds by hand, an open invitation for viewers to socialize and contemplate her work communally.