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Lot Essay
Stefanie Heinze has consistently proved her ability to rail against traditional art forms in a surreal and often humorous manner. Part of ‘Frail Juice’, her critically acclaimed 2020 New York debut exhibition at Petzel Gallery, No! is an important example of Heinze’s signature style. Forms hover between recognizable subjects and pure paint as the viewer searches desperately for a footing within the composition. Writer Kathryn O’Regan notes that “there is a rebellious quality to Heinze’s work. Her canvases…seem to run on instinct and intuition rather than any didactic or historically-informed concern” (K. O’Regan, “Introducing the Berlin artist transforming symbolic objects into dark social critique,” Sleek Magazine, April 26, 2019). Drawing corollaries to the brooding abstractions of Willem de Kooning and the cerebral scenes of the Surrealists, Heinze creates her own distinct blend of hallucinatory representation.
After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig in 2014 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016, Heinze set about honing her process. Her paintings hinge upon a confusion of spatial relationships and the blending of figuration and abstraction so important to Surrealist predecessors like Salvador Dalí. Chiara Di Leone observed this interplay of open structure and meticulous rendering, noting, “In spite of resisting facile references, order, and linear interpretations, Heinze’s work revels in precision, which is detectable in her intentional lines and impeccable compositions,” (C. Di Leone, “Stefanie Heinze is Reordering Reality,” Cultured Magazine, December 2022). Organic forms bursting with color are always on the verge of coalescing into something we know, but Heinze makes sure that reality is kept forever at bay.
In recent years, Heinze has become one of the most exciting voices in contemporary painting. Her work is included in the collections of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Marguerite Hoffman Collection, Dallas, and the Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England. Her work has also been exhibited in the L’Almanach 23 biennial at the Consortium Museum in Dijon, France, as well as in other prestigious group shows at the Boros Foundation at Berghain, Berlin (2020), the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2020), and the Saatchi Gallery, London.
After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig in 2014 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016, Heinze set about honing her process. Her paintings hinge upon a confusion of spatial relationships and the blending of figuration and abstraction so important to Surrealist predecessors like Salvador Dalí. Chiara Di Leone observed this interplay of open structure and meticulous rendering, noting, “In spite of resisting facile references, order, and linear interpretations, Heinze’s work revels in precision, which is detectable in her intentional lines and impeccable compositions,” (C. Di Leone, “Stefanie Heinze is Reordering Reality,” Cultured Magazine, December 2022). Organic forms bursting with color are always on the verge of coalescing into something we know, but Heinze makes sure that reality is kept forever at bay.
In recent years, Heinze has become one of the most exciting voices in contemporary painting. Her work is included in the collections of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Marguerite Hoffman Collection, Dallas, and the Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England. Her work has also been exhibited in the L’Almanach 23 biennial at the Consortium Museum in Dijon, France, as well as in other prestigious group shows at the Boros Foundation at Berghain, Berlin (2020), the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2020), and the Saatchi Gallery, London.