Looking at Stefanie Heinze’s paintings is like searching for shapes in clouds, if the clouds were memories of cartoons from when you were a kid. You spy bulging eyes, flopping ears, legs running past in a blur. These intricate, neat but somehow totally messy paintings are like someone’s fed every Looney Tunes character into a Nutribullet and tried to reassemble the gloop.
So there’s a really pleasing, nostalgic, childish quality to the work, but an angry, vicious maturity too. Abstract yet full of figuration – hands, eyes and penises – they’re grown up and stupid at the same time. Most of us can probably relate to that.
