Charline of Heyl: The woman as a thought machine

For 20 years, the German painter Charline von Heyl lives in New York. Before her biggest show, which is currently running in Hamburg, we visited her in the studio.

Charline of Heyl: The woman as a thought machine
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  • Page 1 — woman as a thought machine
  • Page 2 — Composition with Hare
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    For most New Yorkers, this part of city is a white spot on map. Brooklyn Navy Yard is name of compartmentalised plant on a bulge of East River between Vinegar Hill and Williamsburg. At beginning of 19th century re were frigates, later submarines and aircraft carriers. Only a few weeks ago a historic anchor and cannon balls were recovered from water. Today, or industries are in old who are at home, re are movie studios, artist studios, offices. Hillary Clinton had her campaign headquarters here. You can't just walk in. The porter wants to know reason for visit, such as small Museum of history of Navy Yard – or an appointment. As we are now using Charline from Heyl.

    The German artist, born 1960, has lived in Manhattan for two decades and has been her studio here in Brooklyn for five years. Her olive-green paint coat, jeans, black sneakers, everything carries traces of her painting, only head makes a perfectly tidy impression. With a cup of coffee, which is in café on ground floor, we take elevator to top floor of old warehouse building. Behind a simple metal door, her whole pictorial cosmos is on. Over three rooms are distributed countless pictures on walls, small paper works and monumental canvases at different stages of completion, on tables and on floor colors in vials, tubes, boxes and canisters, brushes in cans, jars, crates, Patterned fabrics, books, postcards. The view through windows extends across warehouses and ancient cranes up to Manhattan on or side of river. We remain standing in front of a wall on which individual moulds cut out of thin cardboard are glued. The artist takes one of m: "I've only been doing this recently," she explains, sticking orange-yellow head with a quick movement on a canvas, taking it off again and sticking it to anor place. "It is as if some images have waited for a particular symbol." When right place is found, it paints template down to smallest detail. In this case, it is a stylized profile of Emily Dickinson.

    "Mana Hatta" of 2017 reflects nervous, fragile New York feeling in menacing Trump era. © Jason Mandella/courtesy of artist and Petzel, New York

    Charline of Heyl picks up a book by American poet and reads enigmatic poem Banish air from air. "Radical and minimalist, with three or four lines, it brings something to point that doesn't necessarily make sense. That has to do with painting for me, "she says. It is astonishing from Heyl that Dickinson in 19th century in New England "almost always stayed in her room", but poem still today in NYC so extremely urban and modern, that it is downright "tattooed into brain". She drew her head with blonde Dutt very quickly and later realized that she had painted a similar head many years ago: "In my early paintings I hid secret self-portraits, always only forehead, a hemisphere with blond hair, much to Abstract than that someone could see it as a portrait. " This was quite a contrast to usual depictions of women, which were always defined by body, regardless of wher male artists or feminists. Her image of Emily Dickinson comes without feminine attributes. "It is woman as a poetry machine or as a thinking machine." From September new works will be shown with stylized poet at Petzel Gallery in New York. Charline of Heyl sticks his head back to wall with or shapes, next to cones, crests and stars, all recognizable symbols, which in ir painting, however, find such a different use: "In stars It is usually about space, to three-dimensional effect, to endlessness. With me, stars become a cage, a lattice that bricks surface. "

    This article is from World Art Magazine No. 145/2018 © World Art Verlag

    Charline von Heyl grew up in Bonn, studied in Hamburg and Düsseldorf and came to New York in middle of Nineties with 36 years. At that time her career was already so well established that she could live from art. "That means something already," she says dry. She was one of artists of Gallery Christian Nagel in Cologne. "It has really moved in early 1990s." The Rhenish painting scene of this time brought toger aestic, excessive and silly, which for curator Dirk Luckow by way is now a reason to show parallel to Charline of Heyl in confessional halls Danes Asger Jorn (1914 – 1973), who this has already partially anticipated principles. The artist also appreciates him very much and even has a picture of him. Why she left Germany? "I had found myself so much, even in opposition, that I had a great desire to lose myself again." She's laughing. "America was very liberating."

    Date Of Update: 08 July 2018, 12:02