Archive for the ‘Charline von Heyl’ Category

Same Paintings, Different Rooms: Charline von Heyl in Boston

May 4 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

For six months, from the fall well through the winter, the large, vibrant paintings of Charline von Heyl hung on the walls of the first-floor gallery at the ICA in Philadelphia. I remember peeking into the gallery as they were uncrating them, how even half unwrapped they caught and drew the eye with their great splashes and zigzags, their stripes and squiggles and harlequin diamonds, their cloudy, ambiguous orbs. These are big paintings, each one nearly seven feet tall, and the 17 of them on view in the exhibition here made the space vibrate with energy and color.

The other week, I had the opportunity to see the show at the ICA/Boston, where—pruned and reconfigured— it is currently on view. I wanted to see how different it would look in that quite different space. Would it be like seeing the same dress on two sisters? Like meeting an old friend after a long absence? Or perhaps it would be like revisiting a familiar city in a different season. (Note: There is no institutional relationship between the two ICAs.)

In Philadelphia, the gallery opens off a tall, sunlit lobby. Entering the show was like plunging into a pool: paintings all around you, a wealth of choices as to where to swim.

Philly view

Photo: Alex Klein

The works were generously separated, but in that big, open space you were always aware of more of them to your left and right, behind the partial walls, and all the way back in the depths of room. Color shimmered everywhere, calling out for you to look.

In Boston, you enter the show through a kind of anteroom, a narrow gallery with one painting on the left: Phoenix, with its swoop of red and its diamonds of blue and black, its white background and lozenges. Rather than plunging, one eases into the show, absorbing the fiery colors and bold shapes of Phoenix like a mountain climber pausing at base camp to get acclimated to the new air.

I pass through a doorway into the second room.

Photo: John Kennard. From left to right: It’s Vot’s Behind Me That I Am (Krazy Kat), 2010. Acrylic, oil on linen and canvas. 82 x 72 inches. Private collection, New York; courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; Yellow Guitar, 2010. Acrylic, oil and charcoal on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Private collection, New York; Alastor, 2008. Acrylic on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

The three paintings in here happen to be three of the von Heyl paintings I know best. I think of them as the drippy purple one, the bright yellow one with the knife, and the one with the squid shapes and the bloody hand prints. I’m happy to see them again after our months apart, but something is strange. I seem to see shapes and patterns I don’t remember: a curving ribbon of black triangles in the drippy purple one, inky tracings in the purple wash in the squid one. In fact, I don’t really remember the purple wash itself—I would have said it was more of a gray. I start to wonder—did I not look at the paintings as closely as I thought I had back in Philadelphia?

This feeling of unfamiliarity is intensified in the final room, where I spend a lot of time staring at a painting I don’t remember, wondering how I could have forgotten it (it turns out it wasn’t in the Philadelphia iteration of the show). I circle around a couple of times, eavesdropping on visitors, looking for Untitled (aka: Greetings), the favorite of the Philadelphia ICA’s guard, Linda, but it isn’t here. This show has fewer paintings than the Philadelphia version, which feels like a loss to me, except that I find myself looking more carefully at the paintings that are here, which feels like a gain. Because of the smaller size of the rooms, I’m standing closer to the paintings. I wonder if that’s why the colors look so different.

Photo: John Kennard. From left to right: Time Waiting, 2010. Acrylic and oil on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Solo Dolo, 2010. Oil and charcoal on linen. 82 x 74 inches. Private collection.

According to Jenelle Porter, the show’s curator, the lighting here—a filtered northern light from shaded skylights plus bulbs—has a huge impact on the way the show looks. “I think it’s the light that makes the show look like a jewel box,” she wrote me in an email. “Also, the galleries are very ‘white’ which really makes the color of the painting pop….But all in all, it’s the same show—we even hung the works in essentially the same relationships we established in Philly.”

Still, it’s the differences that stay with me. The word that keeps surfacing in my mind here in Boston is intimate. When I think back on the show in Philadelphia, I think electric, I think buzzing. I loved that electric, buzzing energy, and it was always a delight to wander through the gallery and visit the paintings on my way in to or out of work. But it’s here in Boston, for the first time, that I can imagine living with one.

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Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA/Boston through July 15.

You can read more about Charline von Heyl here and here.

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Charline von Heyl: The right kind of frustration

February 17 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“When I went to Marfa last time,” Charline said, “I was totally burned out.” She was speaking at a program at ICA, where her survey exhibition Charline von Heyl, curated by Jenelle Porter, closes this Sunday. Charline spoke passionately and memorably about painting, abstraction, representation, desire, frustration, and how she began her newest body work, during a long stay at her studio in Marfa, Texas. It was one of most dynamic and generous lectures I’ve heard in a long time.

Installation view

Installation view. Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media.

“I’m always fascinated by the stupidity of the painter,” Charline declared, meaning the way a painting grows out of small steps taken in the studio—out of doing things that might seem dumb at first glance but are necessary to awaken what she calls the right kind of frustration. This is the active frustration that leads to solving problems in paint, as opposed to the passive frustration that leads to nothing but sitting gloomily on the couch.

Not that sitting around on the couch can’t be a part of the process too. In Marfa, Charline did a lot of reading and looking at books, a lot of walking in the parched Texas landscape and whiskey-drinking and lonely mulling. Among the books she spent time with were catalogues of work by Willi Baumeister and Bernard Buffet. Of an early Buffet self-portrait she said, “It’s so weird and stubborn and awkward, but also right.” I think that’s one of the most profound compliments I’ve ever heard an artist give another.

Buffet self-portrait

Bernard Buffet, 1981

I love listening to artists talk about the work of other artists. It’s almost better than hearing them talk about their own art, maybe because the way they see the work of others isn’t clouded by desire or intention, insecurity or pride.

Or maybe, on the other hand, it’s precisely because their own particular artistic desires and intentions, insecurities and/or pride, make them see other artists’ work in ways the rest of us don’t.

One of my favorite parts of the talk was a discussion of the work of the figurative painter Dana Schutz—in particular, of Schutz’s 2007 portrait of Mike Kelley. “It’s visionary,” Charline said. “It takes you someplace.” Schutz, Charline suggested, imagined the figure (she worked without a photograph), then tweaked it: the fist is too small to be realistic, for example, and the elbow lines up conveniently with the edge of the canvas. “In abstraction,” she said, “it’s the same thing. I’m tweaking, too.” But, since she’s not working from an original in nature, the viewer can’t identify what she’s tweaking from: “You just feel the strangeness. It’s charged with something.”

"Daydreamer"

"Daydreamer," Dana Schutz, oil on canvas, 2007. Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

In relation to Buffet, Charline also said this: “I am interested in artists who are considered second rate, or third rate, because they get onto something, but then they get stuck repeating themselves.” Maybe this insight is part of Charline’s determination not to repeat herself. It is often said about her work that each painting is utterly different, a world in itself. Yet of course there are things that unify the work: her taste, the way she handles color, the way the scale of the paintings is an outgrowth of the size of her gestures. All these things are part of what she calls “a little of the red thread that runs through,” which I take to mean the continuity that comes from her singular hand: her singular self.

The other week, when curator Bennett Simpson was speaking at ICA, he said something interesting about inevitability. Whenever a mode of working, or an artist, becomes a major focus of the art world (Bennett said), that mode or person takes on an air of inevitability; but really, there is no inevitability. There are always a million things we might be talking about, so it’s worth asking what constellation of circumstances makes that one thing so present in the public imagination. He was referring to the incorporation of props and stagecraft in current art; but I’ve been thinking about the extent to which Charline von Heyl and her work have—apparently suddenly—sprung into the public imagination. Witness recent pieces on the painter in Artforum, Parkett, The Huffington Post, Art in America, and elsewhere, as well as a major upcoming exhibition at the Tate Liverpool.

It’s impossible to say how much of this sudden spotlighting is because of the nature of the current artistic moment, the reassessment of abstraction, the sheer fascination of the work itself, the painter’s personal charisma, specific serendipitous meetings, or anything else. But as we get ready to say goodbye to Charline von Heyl at ICA, I like to think we’ve been a star in that constellation.

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Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA through Sunday, February 19. Don’t miss it!

From March 21 – July 8, you can see the show at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@ica.upenn.edu

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Make Your Own Luck

November 4 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“Those are finished,” Charline von Heyl says, pointing out some paintings along one wall of her Chelsea studio. “The ones on that side I’m still working on.”

It’s a bright October afternoon and Charline, whose work first appeared at ICA in the 2006 exhibition Make Your Own Life: Artists in and out of Cologne—and whose ten-year retrospective is on view at the museum this fall and winter—is hosting a studio visit for ICA’s Leadership Circle and Art Council members. Tubes of paint are lined up neatly on a table, and there’s a battered couch under the window with tea, cigarettes, glue, books, and a bottle of whiskey close at hand. A corner of the room is crowded with shelves, and Charline goes over there a couple of times to find something to show us: a volume on Juan Gris, a French book of fairy tales told largely through pictures—Épinal-sheets—that used to belong to her mother and on the pages of which Charline’s own childish marks can be seen. “It’s funny,” she says, flipping through the pages. “I still know most of the images by heart. Your taste is done very early.”

Every day when I go to work at ICA, I peek into the gallery at Charline’s big paintings, which look elegant and formal spaced out on our big white walls.

Charline von Heyl, It's Vot's Behind Me That I Am (Krazy Kat), 2010, acrylic, oil on linen and canvas, 82 x 72 inches. Private collection, New York; courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

In here, clustered closely together and propped up on bricks and blocks, they look more casual, their scale somehow more human. Or maybe it’s that Charline is here touching them, moving them around, and talking about them.

“I love stripes,” she says, pointing to one of the paintings. “If I can’t get anywhere and I don’t know what to do, I paint some stripes.” The stripes may or may not not stay. They may be painted over later—just a way in, something to help open up the canvas. “The first demand is always the white square,” she says. “To tickle something out of it.”

Charline, who was born in Germany, has lived in the US for decades. She is tall and confident in jeans and boots, a vest over her shirt, her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her easy, self-deprecating way of joking about herself is striking. “I’m one of those people no one believes exists, who always knew she wanted to be a painter,” she says. “I was so convinced I was a painter that for an eternity I didn’t paint.”

She points to a canvas. “That painting is just slowly building up, and I don’t know where it’s going yet.” She moves to another, foggy blacks and grays with black splotches of spray paint across the surface. “I knew when I went at that one with the spray paint, either it would work or I would destroy it.”

“It’s like you’re vandalizing your own painting,” Ingrid says.

Charline agrees. Either it works, or you throw it away—that’s her attitude. She doesn’t seem bothered by that. She says she gets easily bored: “I am always just in love with change.” Change, layers, newness, ugliness. “It’s really following a desire to see, and to see something else again. Obviously it gets harder as you get older. It’s the original motor that makes me want to work.”

We look at the paintings, turning slowly around the room, pointing, looking harder. We ask questions about titles, influences, how many paintings she works on at a time. She shows us African Kuba cloths she likes, exercises in abstraction made of raffia: “The pattern shifts and you can’t see where it shifts…Only women are allowed to do them.”

She points out a snake in one of her paintings, a frame painted into another, a highly representational piece of skin in a third. She tells the story of how she ended up in America, one piece in a group show leading to a cheap apartment, leading to meeting people, leading to the next thing and then the next. And here she is.

“I was often in the right place at the right time,” Charline von Heyl says of her career. And while that may be true, it’s also clear that through some combination of stubbornness, risk-taking, perseverance, and talent, this is a painter who makes her own luck.

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For more information about ICA’s Art Council and Leadership Circle opportunities, email Christianna Miller at chmille@ica.upenn.edu.

Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA through February 19, 2012.

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@ica.upenn.edu.

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Opening Night Day 2011: Adrenaline buzz

September 9 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

I WANT TO WRITE THIS WHOLE BLOG POST IN CAPITAL LETTERS!

It’s the pre-opening energy, that jazzy adrenaline buzz that floats up the elevator shaft and down again through the heating vents on every ICA opening day, making me feel like shouting. I have finished my own last-minute assignments for tonight so I’m free for a few minutes to wander around the building watching other people hurry to finish theirs. At five o’clock the doors will open. It’s two-thirty now.

Becket moving the podium

Becket moving the podium

Three new shows will open tonight. The big downstairs gallery hosts Charline von Heyl’s paintings, enormous planes of color that seem to vibrate on the walls as though they too can feel the excitement. A few minutes ago I let in some people from Friedrich Petzel, Charline’s New York gallery, and as they turned the corner into the show I heard them say, “Wow!”

On the second floor, there’s a lot of activity in Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters, the big group show guest curated by Doron Rabina. There are a lot of animals in here—at least on video—enormous peacocks, a cawing raven, a quick fox, and a man with a chicken on his head on the wall just outside the gallery. There’s a supine figure lying on the floor (last week I saw it creepily unwrapped from the plastic sheet it was packed in), and a video fire blazing in an overturned desk. Some guys are moving equipment around, and the wall labels are provisionally tacked in place with blue tape, and Thom is walking through with a push broom, sweeping. It’s vibrant and noisy and wonderfully weird in here. Last week, when ICA’s director came through, she announced enthusiastically, “It’s a show about poetry! A poetic show.”

Sound guys setting up

Sound guys setting up

Stepping through the door into the Project Space is like stepping into a pool of stillness. ICA has recreated the studio of sculptor, print-maker, and teacher Bill Walton, complete with tools and works-in-progress, sweatshirts and coffee cups. Last week, when Grace was unpacking and arranging the contents, she told me some of the coffee cups contained old cigarette butts, making it extra important not to spill. With drawers ajar and slippers under the table, it looks like Walton, who died last year, has just gone out for a cigarette.

Out on the terrace, some guys are setting up the tent for the dinner while Jeff arranges tables. Becket is moving the podium. Alex and Jenna are looking for Doron to record an interview about his show for the website. William is tucking boxes away in a closet. Jacob is painting a wall. The sound guys are setting up in a corner. Thom is now sweeping out on the mezzanine, near where an exhausted figure, worn out from the week’s installation, naps on a pouf.

Some ICA staff members are already dressed in their opening finery: black dresses with cut-out sleeves, black dresses with elegant collars, high-heeled shoes showing off new pedicures. Others have hung dresses on the coat hooks, sheathed in garment bags, making for more surprise later, just as the locked museum doors this past month make for surprise tonight. I hope that, as I type this on Wednesday afternoon, you are somewhere putting your own finery on, getting ready to join us.

Of course, by the time you’re reading this, it will all be over: the party dresses put away, the speeches faded, the adrenaline spent, the spills mopped up. The art, though, will still be at the ready, waiting on the walls and plinths and video screens for you to come in.

Thom sweeping.

Thom sweeping.

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