Charline von Heyl’s bold paintingsare untamable. Each painting with its individual logic stimulates anopen-ended on-going series of experiences. Within the same work vonHeyl’s painting can conjoin doubt and ecstasy, states of intoxicationand sober insight. Her paintings command our attention. They arrest theviewer intellectually, physically and emotionally.

“For me, whatmakes a painting is a mixture of authority and freedom, where it reallyjust wants to be itself, where there is no justification, orexplanation, or anything like that. Where it’s just what it is forwhatever reason.”

Charline 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 ownimages, activating our participation. Similar to Alice who cried”curioser and curiouser” as she tumbled down the rabbit hole, whentraversing von Heyl’s paintings one spirals through an on-going seriesof events in which everything seems possible, and we enter that “otherworld” of imagination. In its juxtapositions, contrasts, and unyieldingvon Heyl’s paintings make the case for paintingʼs power to provoke.

Charlinevon Heyl was born in Germany. She lives and works in New York. Her workhas been exhibited both in the United States and internationallyincluding solo exhibitions at the Le Consortium, Dijon, Worcester ArtMuseum, Dallas Museum of Art and Vienna Secession with major upcomingsolo exhibitions at ICA Philadelphia, Tate Liverpool, ICA Boston andKunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany. Released this year is the majormonograph, Charline von Heyl, Paintings: 1990-2010, published by Lespresses du réel.