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Lot Essay
Stefanie Heinze’s large-scale painting In Limbo (Waiting for a Better Half) (2015) teeters precariously between figuration and abstraction, transfixing the viewer with ambiguous anthropomorphic forms and rich swaths of colour. As with many of Heinze’s paintings, the work creates an effect of fluid movement, where figures exist in a state of flux, caught between one state and the next. Amidst a flowing churn of blues, greys, and pinks, the viewer can discern a pair of human legs—deep red, with lavender shoes—stumbling towards the left-hand side of the canvas. In the upper left corner, a mass of yellow resembles a blonde head of hair in a ponytail, positioned away from the viewer, as if sleeping on a pillow. Interconnected by clumsy, repetitive movement, these figures evoke restlessness and change—they are trapped ‘in limbo,’ as the title suggests.
Now based in Berlin, Heinze graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig in 2014 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. Executed in 2015, In Limbo (Waiting for a Better Half) is an early example of the German artist’s signature freeform approach, where the empty canvas presents an opportunity for questioning: ‘I try to enjoy the condition of not-yet knowing,’ she says (S. Heinze, quoted in K. Holmes, ‘Hallucinatory Paintings Depict the Bodily Impossible,’ Vice, 2016). While her works’ biomorphic, dreamlike qualities echo aspects of Surrealist painting, Heinze claims inspiration from no artistic school or movement, working in an intuitive idiom that is entirely her own.
Heinze’s blundering, fleshy figures ultimately defy interpretation: while undeniably humanlike, her polymorphous shapes always evade our intellectual grasp. They bleed into one another, merging with objects in the surrounding periphery, and terminating awkwardly just before they become coherent. As a result, the viewer’s eye traverses the canvas in turbulent cycles of re-evaluation, seeing its subjects anew each time. Heinze describes her painting process as an act of transformation and discovery, where imperfection provides an opportunity for creative exploration. Flaws and failures are thoughtfully recorded in precise detail: as the artist says, ‘I like to harness clumsiness in my paintings as a tool’ (S. Heinze in conversation with Twin Magazine, London, 2017).
Now based in Berlin, Heinze graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig in 2014 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. Executed in 2015, In Limbo (Waiting for a Better Half) is an early example of the German artist’s signature freeform approach, where the empty canvas presents an opportunity for questioning: ‘I try to enjoy the condition of not-yet knowing,’ she says (S. Heinze, quoted in K. Holmes, ‘Hallucinatory Paintings Depict the Bodily Impossible,’ Vice, 2016). While her works’ biomorphic, dreamlike qualities echo aspects of Surrealist painting, Heinze claims inspiration from no artistic school or movement, working in an intuitive idiom that is entirely her own.
Heinze’s blundering, fleshy figures ultimately defy interpretation: while undeniably humanlike, her polymorphous shapes always evade our intellectual grasp. They bleed into one another, merging with objects in the surrounding periphery, and terminating awkwardly just before they become coherent. As a result, the viewer’s eye traverses the canvas in turbulent cycles of re-evaluation, seeing its subjects anew each time. Heinze describes her painting process as an act of transformation and discovery, where imperfection provides an opportunity for creative exploration. Flaws and failures are thoughtfully recorded in precise detail: as the artist says, ‘I like to harness clumsiness in my paintings as a tool’ (S. Heinze in conversation with Twin Magazine, London, 2017).