In her paintings, Stefanie Heinze draws from high and low culture to playfully subvert the constructions of gender, sexuality and class in society. Her paintings capture fantastical scenes in which body parts, food items, animals, cartoon-characters and everyday items converge and dissolve into one another and their surroundings.
Heinze transfers the composition of her paintings from small-scale collaged drawings to large-scale canvases. This translation adds dynamism and allows for the inclusion of mistakes – an integral feature of her practice. The work joyously defies normative expectations of achievement, logic and narrative – the creative potential of failure is key. Across her hallucinatory scenes absurd forms fly, ooze, leak and melt, always on the verge of metamorphosis and collapse. Degenerating into ‘newsense’ – Heinze’s own response to nonsense – these enact new possibilities for existence.