Charline von Heyl

Charline von Heyl is a German artist known for her endlessly layered, enigmatic paintings, drawings, and colleges filled with surprising juxtapositions and interactions. Von Heyl’s pursuit of abstraction is driven by a desire to invent something that has not yet been seen. Her canvases are as thoughtful and cerebral as they are aesthetically balanced, imbued with flashes of humor and poetic depth with an almost printed, two-dimensional quality. Despite its seeming spontaneity, her work is a result of an intensive painterly process where layered brushstrokes and powerful swaths of color clamor for space, creating unexpected collisions and moments of conflict.

Von Heyl was born in Mainz, Germany and moved to Hamburg in the 1980s to attend the Hochschule für bildende Künste. Interested in the impersonal and detached nature of paintings by Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen and the alchemical nature of painting embraced by artists such as Sigmar Polke, von Heyl created a unique visual style that refuses to rely on the existing world, instead coalescing inspirations from design, decoration, graphic illustrations and source materials from the artist’s life into emotionally raw and visually enigmatic works. Von Heyl consistently redefines the boundaries of contemporary painting, forging a unique stylistic path that has received widespread critical recognition. As such, she was prominently exhibited in the Central Pavilion of The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale and her work is held in esteemed institutions around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.