In 1995, when she was 22, Rachel Heller had her first solo show, at the John Jones Art Centre in London. The exhibition sold out. This was not her first success, nor would it be her last. In 1986, when Heller was 13, a selection of her drawings was shown to the television grandee Jeremy Isaacs, who promptly bought one. In 2006, her figure study Lady Sleeping in Bed won the Hugh Casson drawing prize at the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition. In 2015, Heller’s work was included in an exhibition at the Senator Group’s showroom in New York.
It is not difficult to see the reasons for her success. Heller, who has died of sepsis aged 49, had a particular bent for drawing, notably in pastel and chalk. Her range was considerable, from quick, deft Hockneyish works such as Flowers Still Life (2016) to dense, compacted figure studies such as Sleeping Woman (2006) and Stand Prose (2011).
These last, in portrait or landscape format, often have the feel of enamels or stained glass – discrete areas of vivid colour, parallel to the picture plane and welded together by expressive black outlines. Among her most memorable works was Windows 2 (2001), whose flat, planar composition hovers between representation and abstraction in a way that calls to mind early 20th-century German experimental painting.
What makes Heller’s success the more extraordinary is that she had been born with Down’s syndrome. The fate of artists with Down’s has tended to be consignment to that catch-all group known as “outsider artists”, a term invented to include such variously disadvantaged sub-groups as the psychotic, self-taught, imprisoned, naive and visionary. The American fibre sculptor Judith Scott, who also had Down’s syndrome, was shown and written about almost exclusively in terms of her condition. This was not to be the case with Heller.
Born in London, the daughter of the gallerist Angela Flowers and her partner (later second husband), the management writer Robert Heller, Rachel had shown signs of talent from an early age. Sent to a special needs primary school, Holly Court, near her parents’ home in Highgate, she quickly began to draw – animated, stick-figure people merrily dancing and playing football. It was one of these, taken into the Flowers Gallery by her mother, that was bought by Isaacs.
Her enthusiasm for drawing grew. At 16, Heller enrolled on to a special needs art course at Hammersmith and West London College, where she was encouraged to sit art A-level. She went on to do a foundation course at the Byam Shaw School of Art, taking a diploma in 2001. This was followed by summer courses at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2001 and 2003, and two years at the Prince’s (now Royal) Drawing School from 2005. She also went with a friend to sketch at the Victoria and Albert Museum every Sunday, often working from religious pictures but also drawing fellow visitors.
Having a mother who was at the centre of the London gallery world exposed her to art at an early age. Among Heller’s friends were fellow artists who showed at Flowers Cork Street or Flowers East – Maggi Hambling and Sir Peter Blake were both fans of her work – as well as non-Flowers artists such as David Hockney. “He signed my catalogue ‘To Rachel’,” Angela Flowers once complained.
If she showed frequently at her mother’s gallery, particularly in the annual exhibitions of small-scale works called Small Is Beautiful, this did not, however, explain Heller’s success elsewhere. Entries to the Royal Academy’s summer show are submitted anonymously: her drawings were chosen by the RA’s panel of judges six times between 2002 and 2016. In her 40s, Heller also began to make sculptures – clay-based mixed-media works that had the same merry density as her chalk-and-pastel figure drawings.
Like many people with Down’s syndrome, Heller’s speech was limited. Her father felt that her drawings stood in for words; it was how she communicated, he said, not least with him. Bob Heller was also insistent that his daughter should not be defined by her condition, seeing her instead as “simply a very amiable and slightly eccentric person”. With her taste for denim jackets and a black fringe dyed pink, Heller could have been any voguish London artist, although she also had something of her mother’s magnificence.
After a decade with Parkinson’s disease, Bob died in 2012. He and Angela had moved out of London to Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire some years before, and Rachel went with them. Latterly, she and Angela moved again, to Ramsgate in Kent, to be near other family members.
“It’s hard to imagine actually leaving her,” Flowers had once said of Rachel. “That’s when having a child with special needs is tough.” As Rachel’s brother Matthew said, mother and daughter had “never been apart for 50 years”. Angela Flowers died in August; Heller died five weeks later, the day before her 50th birthday.
She is survived by her siblings, the children of her mother’s first marriage, Adam, Matthew, Daniel and Francesca.
• Rachel Heller, artist, born 15 September 1973; died 14 September 2023
