CHARLINE VON HEYL

Charline von Heyl’s bold paintings are untamable. Each painting with its individual logic, stimulates an open-ended on-going series of experiences. Within the same work von Heyl’s painting can conjoin doubt and ecstasy, states of intoxication and sober insight. Her paintings command our attention. They arrest the viewer intellectually, physically and emotionally. In Small Paintings, von Heyl approaches the canvas not as a warm up or a detail to a larger work but rather challenges her practice by submitting herself to a different set of rules. The scale of the work demands an actual physical proximity on the part of the viewer that changes and extends the “time release factor.” The viewer is not immediately drawn into the painting by the apparent speed and manipulation of the gesture but asked into a more intimate relationship with the painting, where your space is prolonged in a mirror like way by their presence. Von Heyl’s paintings do not sit still, as the eye searches attempting to trace layers, strokes & patches. The mind taking in this new information also shifts, creating its own images, activating our participation. Similar to Alice who cried “curioser and curiouser” as she tumbled down the rabbit hole, when traversing von Heyl’s paintings one spirals through an on-going series of events in which everything seems possible, and we enter that “other world” of the imagination. In its juxtapositions, contrasts, and unyielding von Heyl’s paintings make the case for paintings power to provoke.

Charline von Heyl was born in Mainz, Germany. She lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited both in the United States and internationally including solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art and Vienna Secession.

Major solo exhibitions include: 2006 Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, NY; 2005 Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; 2004 Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Germany Group exhibitions include: 2006 In Dialogue, Elizabeth Dee, New York; 2004 Back to Paint, C & M Arts, New York, NY; Painting 2004, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, United Kingdom; 2001 Musterkarte, Modelos de Pintura en Alemania, Goethe-Institut International, Madrid; 1999 Das XX. Century, INIT Kunsthalle Berlin. Curated by Alexander Schroeder and Christian Nagel.