On 6 January 2018, Mary Boone Gallery, in cooperation with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, will open at its Chelsea location Food for the Young (Oozing Out), an exhibition curated by Piper Marshall of new paintings by Berlin-based artist Stefanie Heinze.
Food for the Young (Oozing Out) is so termed for the way in which the abject may both provide sustenance and compel us to turn away from it. With this exhibition, Heinze invites us into a dialogue with fictional scenes, showing us bodies opening up. Heinze offers wry portrayals of overabundance to point toward how surplus may define our interior dialogues and inflect our external landscape.
An emerging artist, Heinze engaged a multipart process to create the work for this exhibition. To begin, she makes intuitive drawings of ink on paper which are left as they are or collaged together into hybrid, fleshy follies. Heinze then enlarges the drawing material to its painterly state. The transfer from hand to arm alters the line so that the physical gesture adds to the overall structure. This visual process slows down the immediacy of these shapes. They are sumptuous, but they do not yield to narrative.
In the paintings, the imagery of body parts and of things both converges and then disarticulates itself from its parts. In Cephalopod (Silken Touch), plumped-up lips consume a multi-legged figure. The toes here dissolve into the texture of the background which flows onward. The figures, like this one, are clumsy. These scenes vibrate with chaotic energy – their flux, evoking transition, solicits attention. As the anarchic bodies fail to cohere, their stutter encourages a return to the title of the exhibition. Heinze zeros in on embodying differently, translating forms which jam our senses and resist consumption.
