Stefanie Heinze

L'Almanach 23 : Stefanie Heinze

Stefanie Heinze’s paintings display ambiguous forms that become recognizable as unexpected subjects. From disembodied body parts, to everyday objects, to animal-like figures, her subjects melt into fantastical backgrounds to create vivid visual worlds, which reveal an interplay between high and low culture. 

Heinze’s brightly colored, imaginative compositions are tenderly subversive in their details and symbolism, complemented with equally lyrical titles.
 Pencil, ink, or ballpoint pen drawings – sometimes torn and collaged into multi-layered compositions – form a basis for Stefanie Heinze’s artistic practice, mapping for the opulent language of her paintings. Testing the fine line between abstraction and figuration, Heinze is categorically unique, as she explores new senses and possibilities of representation.
 Rejecting the pressure for things to align along certain expectations or norms, Heinze thinks of her paintings as a home for visual language to merely exist and belong to what she understands to be a state of being. She refers to her imagery as both mental and bodily experiences that can display a kind of otherwordliness or strangeness, figuring out transformative states of depiction that equally integrate the banal with the unexplainable. Feelings come up that are all too familiar: Uncertainty, insecurity, confusion, shame, excitement, or even disgust. However, "it’s not on me to tell you what to see or feel," she stresses.
 How do we speak about what we see when we enter a terrain that already left the breakfast table, bypasses art history and leaves us in a state of disorientation.