Stefanie Heinze
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Biography
Born 1987 in Berlin
Lives and works in New York
Stefanie Heinze’s paintings display ambiguous forms that become recognizable as unexpected subjects. From disembodied body parts, to everyday objects, to animal-like figures, her subjects melt into fantastical backgrounds to create vivid visual worlds, which reveal an interplay between high and low culture. Heinze’s brightly colored, imaginative compositions are tenderly subversive in their details and symbolism, complemented with equally lyrical titles. Pencil, ink, or ballpoint pen drawings – sometimes torn and collaged into multi-layered compositions – form a basis for Stefanie Heinze’s artistic practice, mapping for the opulent language of her paintings. Testing the fine line between abstraction and figuration, Heinze is categorically unique, as she explores new senses and possibilities of representation. Rejecting the pressure for things to align along certain expectations or norms, Heinze thinks of her paintings as a home for visual language to merely exist and belong to what she understands to be a state of being. She refers to her imagery as both mental and bodily experiences that can display a kind of otherwordliness or strangeness, figuring out transformative states of depiction that equally integrate the banal with the unexplainable. Feelings come up that are all too familiar: Uncertainty, insecurity, confusion, shame, excitement, or even disgust. However, "it’s not on me to tell you what to see or feel," she stresses. How do we speak about what we see when we enter a terrain that already left the breakfast table, bypasses art history and leaves us in a state of disorientation.
She currently has a solo exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin running until March 2025. The artist had further solo exhibitions at Petzel Gallery, New York (2024), Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2022), Petzel, New York (2020), Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2021); LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2019); Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (2019); Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2018); among others. Stefanie Heinze participated in numerous group shows including the Consortium Museum (2023); The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire (2022-23); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); Boros Foundation at Berghain, Berlin (2020); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2020); Saatchi Gallery, London (2018); Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2017); Good Press, Glasgow (2016); and Basis, Frankfurt (2015).Stefanie Heinze’s works are held in various collections worldwide, such as the AMA Collection, Venice; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Musée d‘Art Moderne de Paris; MAMCO, Geneva; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; Marguerite Hoffman Collection, Dallas; The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre, UK; the Delfina Collection, UK; and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. -
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WorksOpen a larger version of the following image in a popup:
XVII, 2022, Oil and acrylic on linen, 120 x 75 cm / 47.3 x 29.3 inches
Stefanie Heinze
O.T. (XVII), 2021Ink and pencil on paper, collagedSigned, dated and titled versoPaper dimensions:
24.3 x 14.8 cm / 9.6 x 5.9 inches
Framed dimensions:
33 x 23.5 cm / 13 x 9.3 inchesB-SHEINZE-.22-0030Pencil, ink or ballpoint pen drawings — sometimes torn and collaged into multi-layered compositions — form the basis of Stefanie Heinze’s artistic practice and set the tone for the opulent...Pencil, ink or ballpoint pen drawings — sometimes torn and collaged into multi-layered compositions — form the basis of Stefanie Heinze’s artistic practice and set the tone for the opulent and often ambiguous language of her paintings. Like in her canvases, the figures depicted in Heinze’s drawings are more open-ended than clearly defined, somewhat like mental images that invite the viewer to form a wide variety of associations.
These works are displayed in small wooden frames. Heinze’s paintings can be seen as mirroring her drawings. They are sketches for specific artistic endeavors, namely for blank canvases onto which the artist projects the forms depicted in her drawings. A process of meticulous painting ensues, the result of which is equally poignant large-scale work.
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Los dibujos a lápiz, tinta o bolígrafo -a veces rasgados y ensamblados en composiciones de varias capas- constituyen la base de la obra artística de Stefanie Heinze y marcan la pauta del lenguaje opulento y a menudo ambiguo de sus pinturas. Al igual que en sus lienzos, las figuras representadas en los dibujos de Heinze son más abiertas que claramente definidas, como si fueran imágenes mentales que invitan al espectador a formar una amplia variedad de asociaciones.
Estas obras se exponen en pequeños marcos de madera. Las pinturas de Heinze son un reflejo de sus dibujos. Son bocetos para proyectos artísticos concretos, lienzos en blanco sobre los que la artista proyecta las formas representadas en sus dibujos. A continuación tiene lugar un meticuloso proceso de pintura, cuyo resultado es una obra a gran escala igualmente conmovedora.ExhibitionsExternal ExhibitionsNewsPressPublicationsVideo