For her Petzel debut with "Frail Juice" back in 2020, PAPER invited Berlin-born artist Stefanie Heinze to interview herself. Since then, she’s relocated to New York and opened her second solo show at the gallery’s Chelsea location, now on display through Saturday, June 8. Titled "MORTAR (the cute ones shouldn’t go unnoticed)", Heinze’s new collection of work “investigates systems of knowledge and truth, challenging received notions of representation,” according to a release.
To Heinze, “mortar” symbolizes the container for something to be developed further. A mortar and pestle, for example, is the site for different ingredients to be crushed and mixed together, in some cases turned into a paste to help bind building blocks. On a human level, this is not unlike our “longing for something even better and bigger and harder,” Petzel explains, as reflected in Heinze’s process to create the canvases shown in MORTAR.
Similarly, Heinze’s small-scale drawings and collages undergo several evolutions over weeks, before eventually becoming large-scale tracings. Her work is neither figuration nor abstraction, with colorful and ambiguous worlds (with banana slices, body parts and more) that are at once still and in motion for viewers to arrive at their own interpretations. In our 2020 conversation, she told herself that “composition” is the most boring painting topic, which is perhaps why MORTAR feels like an undoing of any intentional arrangements.
Below, Stefanie Heinze interviews herself (again) about tarot cards, rules and art history. Plus, her favorite color is still yellow years later.
To read more, click here or download it below.
