Charline von Heyl

Born in Germany in 1960 and spending time in Cologne among the 1980s emerging art scene there Charline von Heyl has lived in the United States since 1996. She is renowned for her dynamic, constantly ground-breaking approach to painting producing works that are pull from abstraction, figuration, collage, drawing and graphic design. Every painting is developed separately with its own analytical and processual rules as set up by the artist. She has described her approach as “the desire to invent an image that has not yet been seen and cannot be named” as such her reason to paint and her method are often paradoxical, she creates deep flat space, intense blocks of colour or static and frozen gestures can all be combined with opposing speeds and outcomes.

DAYDRINKING (2016) features layers of painted and cut canvas over a plain un-primed background. Each bottle is cut from canvas and applied to the surface of the work. The striped foreground is reflected in a chaotic manner in the disparate painting styles on the bottles. von Heyl uses humour and unexpected methods to challenge the traditional notion of what a painting should be and allowing for an open-ended visual experience, playing on negative tropes and space to create this graphic and optically pleasing composition.