Stefanie Heinze: Genuflect Softly #1

16 Mar-22 Apr 2017

Overview

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present young German artist Stefanie Heinze’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

In Genuflect Softly #1, Heinze wryly looks at painting as a pseudo-religious experience. The artist invests her work with a transcendental, almost ethereal quality by allowing the forms within her paintings to float, morph and collapse in on themselves in a colourful, primordial soup. Christian imagery also creeps into the work; sandal-clad feet walk on water; shapes ascend into the heavens and a triangular figure reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pietà sits upright in Bone on Skin (Mary-Won’t-Go-Around) (2017). Straddling the boundary between life and death, eros and thanatos, where sexual, fleshy parts sit alongside bare bones, the meaning of Heinze’s work is entirely in limbo. This lack of certainty is reflected in the viewing experience where reason degenerates into nonsense; bright warning tape delineates the gallery space while overshoes and white carpet lends the environment a cold, hospital-like tone. Whilst looking at the work, we are made to feel as clumsy and foolish as the protagonists that inhabit the paintings.