Stefanie Heinze. Your Mouth Comes Second
Opening: 31 October, h 6pm
The first solo institutional exhibition of Stefanie Heinze, Your Mouth Comes Second brings together a selection of recent works reflecting the artist’s central concerns: the exploration of tenderness and vulnerability, companionship, the integration of ancient and urban spiritualism, and the depiction and processing of raw materials. Inspired by these counterhegemonic sources of knowledge, Your Mouth Comes Second explores what comes before language. Here, Heinze delves into the realm of observation, sensitivity, appropriation, clumsiness, and uncertainty, channeling her curiosity about the unknown through the act of painting.
Refuting the easy classification of abstraction or figuration, the artist’s process is characterized by the notion of “both and” as an operative sentiment. Heinze starts with small-scale drawings and collages, which are then translated to sweeping tableaus. For her, drawing is an internal act, a process of reduction, while painting is an external act, one of production. Imagery is cut away and built back up, existing somewhere between negation and addition. Provoking constant metamorphosis and change, Heinze’s work disrupts distinctions between so-called high and low culture, from the imagery she cites to the treatment of the paint itself.
On display are several large-scale canvases filled with ambiguous forms; what might appear as body parts, food, animals, and everyday objects converge and dissolve at turns, floating against vivid planes which overlap and obscure one another. Unfiltered, the signs and symbols that appear across her canvases are indistinguishable from odds and ends. Her paintings embrace confusion and uncertainty to destabilize any sense of fixed form or narrative. By stripping language and sabotaging an over-reliance on the mind, Heinze aims to disrupt the psyche, re-engage the body and its senses, and shift perception. For Stefanie Heinze, this approach is both political and deeply personal—the instability she creates is a form of unlearning, rejecting categorization in favor of openness and change as the artist strives for a more empirical vocabulary.
STEFANIE HEINZE (b. 1987, Berlin, Germany) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo (2012) and Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig (2016). She has had solo exhibitions at Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2022); Petzel, New York (2020); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2019); LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2019); among others, as well as group exhibitions including at Le Consortium, Dijon, (2023); The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire (2022-23); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); Boros Foundation at Berghain, Berlin (2020) Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2020); Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (2019); Saatchi Gallery, London (2018); and Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2017). Heinze’s works are in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Musée d‘Art Moderne de Paris; MAMCO, Geneva; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; Marguerite Hoffman Collection, Dallas; The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre, UK; and the Delfina Collection, UK.
