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Lot Essay
Spanning two metres in height and width, DAYDRINKING (2016) is a spellbinding work by Charline von Heyl. Included in her landmark touring exhibition organised by the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2018, it captures the witty and erudite exploration of image-making that lies at the heart of her practice. Interlocking strips of black and white—a recurrent motif in her art—are mounted on raw canvas. Seven bottle shapes, each imprinted with monochrome designs, are strewn across the surface, leaving behind six cut-out silhouettes. A delicate scalloped edge meets the unprimed linen, at odds with the linear rigidity of the stripes. The work combines visual chaos with an innate sense of grammar and logic. Though riddled with nods to still life and geometric abstraction, it ultimately voices a language of its own. For von Heyl, this independence is crucial: her works deliberately eschew concepts and categories, positing picture-making as a form of discovery, communication and knowledge that remains in open-ended dialogue with the viewer.
Born in Germany in 1960, von Heyl came of age amid the irreverent Cologne art scene of the 1980s. She studied with Jörg Immendorff in Düsseldorf, and subsequently moved to Hamburg, where she lived around the corner from Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner. These artists, along with Martin Kippenberger and others, breathed new life into painting at a time when its future seemed uncertain. Their subversive irony and disregard for convention were deeply influential to von Heyl: ‘what was interesting was Kippenberger’s and Albert’s intellectual stance, the way that painting was detached from them,’ she explained. ‘It wasn’t a statement that wanted to prove something. It was just absolutely anarchistic’ (C. von Heyl, interviewed in Even Magazine, Issue 7, Summer 2017, online). After meeting her future husband Christopher Wool, she moved to America in the mid-1990s, where her work began to accrue international acclaim. The 2018 touring exhibition marked a major landmark in her career, representing her largest museum survey in the US to date. The following year, the present work featured as cover artwork for the album Brace for Impact by jazz legends Joe McPhee and Mats Gustafsson.
Though frequently compared to Jacqueline Humphries, Amy Sillman and Laura Owens, von Heyl’s paintings ultimately stand alone. Combining elements of planning with improvised spontaneity, she views her works as mutable, unstable entities that exist in a perpetual state of unfolding. Her paintings do not seek to comment, represent or narrate. Instead, they are conceived as independent, living species: new forms of knowledge about the world that exist beyond traditional models of human communication. Collectively, her works represent a kind of visual ecosystem, bound together by recurring motifs. Repetitive, decorative patterns—often inspired by wallpaper or fabric designs—are juxtaposed with chaotic forms and gestures. She is especially drawn to the idea of still life, she explains, because it is ‘neither abstract nor representational … You’re not interested in what kind of bottle or what kind of bread it is. It is the flat-out vocabulary of painting’ (C. von Heyl, interviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, November 2018, online). In DAYDRINKING, the abstract sense of disorientation created by the skewed bottles becomes a subject in its own right, inviting the viewer to live it, breathe it and—ultimately—hear it speak.
Born in Germany in 1960, von Heyl came of age amid the irreverent Cologne art scene of the 1980s. She studied with Jörg Immendorff in Düsseldorf, and subsequently moved to Hamburg, where she lived around the corner from Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner. These artists, along with Martin Kippenberger and others, breathed new life into painting at a time when its future seemed uncertain. Their subversive irony and disregard for convention were deeply influential to von Heyl: ‘what was interesting was Kippenberger’s and Albert’s intellectual stance, the way that painting was detached from them,’ she explained. ‘It wasn’t a statement that wanted to prove something. It was just absolutely anarchistic’ (C. von Heyl, interviewed in Even Magazine, Issue 7, Summer 2017, online). After meeting her future husband Christopher Wool, she moved to America in the mid-1990s, where her work began to accrue international acclaim. The 2018 touring exhibition marked a major landmark in her career, representing her largest museum survey in the US to date. The following year, the present work featured as cover artwork for the album Brace for Impact by jazz legends Joe McPhee and Mats Gustafsson.
Though frequently compared to Jacqueline Humphries, Amy Sillman and Laura Owens, von Heyl’s paintings ultimately stand alone. Combining elements of planning with improvised spontaneity, she views her works as mutable, unstable entities that exist in a perpetual state of unfolding. Her paintings do not seek to comment, represent or narrate. Instead, they are conceived as independent, living species: new forms of knowledge about the world that exist beyond traditional models of human communication. Collectively, her works represent a kind of visual ecosystem, bound together by recurring motifs. Repetitive, decorative patterns—often inspired by wallpaper or fabric designs—are juxtaposed with chaotic forms and gestures. She is especially drawn to the idea of still life, she explains, because it is ‘neither abstract nor representational … You’re not interested in what kind of bottle or what kind of bread it is. It is the flat-out vocabulary of painting’ (C. von Heyl, interviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, November 2018, online). In DAYDRINKING, the abstract sense of disorientation created by the skewed bottles becomes a subject in its own right, inviting the viewer to live it, breathe it and—ultimately—hear it speak.