Stefanie Heinze

Stefanie Heinze’s paintings open spaces where ambiguous and amorphous forms emerge from her imagination. Whimsical, aggressive, and dreamlike at once, Heinze’s paintings configure abstract forms into unexpected, even disorienting compositions, creating vividly colorful “battlefields” in which they exist and belong, to cite one term we settled on in conversation. A native of East Berlin, Germany, Heinze studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo (2012) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig (2014) and participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (2016) before returning to her home city, where she continues to live and work today. Heinze is interested in shifting the language of painting or inventing one of her own—a practice that, for the artist, has broader implications in creating new modes of optical perception or psychological experience and, ultimately, facilitating the process of change.

When Heinze first stands before a blank canvas, the beginning of the painting process often confronts her with the anxieties that naturally precede a forthcoming change. Heinze refers to Phillip Guston’s musings on the dialectical tension between freedom and “unfreedom” that many artists face at the beginning of a painting, reflecting in her own words that “control represents the choice between ability or non-ability.” Heinze admits to having struggled earlier in her career with the fear of approaching an empty canvas to control it and the vulnerability of exposing herself to it for others to witness. The surmounting pressure to produce something artistically original or genius during art school only further contributed to her hesitance towards a painting in its initial stages. The blank canvas, as Guston might suggest, can represent the open possibilities of what could be expressed on it inasmuch as it also reveals the psychological barriers that inhibit an artist like Heinze from manifesting them.

Heinze, however, has since developed her own methods to cross those barriers by accepting and even toying with the inevitability of uncertainty. Especially in the context of a traditional art-historical education that skewed towards male artists, the painter has endeavored to reach beyond conventions and certainties in order to champion the unknown—with “slap and care,” she likes to say. Now, at the precipice of change before starting a work, Heinze is learning to negotiate the “choice between ability and non-ability” that comes with control by listening to and collaborating with the painting itself—the very thing that she is attempting to control or change. Investing trust in the process, as uncomfortable as it may be at first, allows her to loosen up and then lose herself in the act of creating, freeing her from the pressure of adhering to strict expectations of how a painting might turn out. Heinze usually begins her work from drawings or collages, which provide initial clarity and control for the painter; but she enters an intimate momentum with her paintings only during the stages of ambiguity that occur further along the painting process. These stages are most productive and audacious for the artist insofar as they are sublime, allowing her to directly confront the esoteric unknown through her paintings and embrace it as she works, often from canvas to canvas, in a rhythm of “wild and dizzying” moments.

<Read the full essay from Issue Four>