The Bold Work of Charline von Heyl

With her richly dissonant, enigmatic canvases, the artist continually pushes painting in compelling new directions

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted February 29, 2012·Magazine

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/artist-charline-von-heyl-article

Charline von Heyl is all about incongruities—in life as well as in her art. The German-born painter divides her time between New York and Marfa, the middle-of-nowhere West Texas town that, despite its well-documented rise as a cultural destination, remains undeniably sleepy. She and her husband, painter Christopher Wool, both did artist residencies in Marfa and fell in love with it. “I need the electric environment of New York, but I’m always so hungry to get to the solitude of Marfa,” says Von Heyl, who typically spends at least part of each winter in Texas. “It allows me to really concentrate and dig deeper.”

That intense engagement is evident in Von Heyl’s paintings, complexly layered compositions teeming with oppositions: abstraction and figuration, organic and geometric forms, depth and flatness. Though she draws inspiration from disparate sources ranging from comic books to Abstract Expressionist masters, her references are rarely literal; each canvas is an improvisation the artist works and reworks, obliterating and rebuilding as she goes, often mixing media. “It’s like bending bones,” she says, “combining things that don’t seem to want to go together to make a new kind of image.” This keen sense of process, even struggle, is what gives Von Heyl’s art its vitality, the interplay of elements amounting to a rich visual stew. As critic Jerry Saltz once wrote, “Much of her art takes me to a wonderful snake pit where styles I thought were outmoded turn dangerous again.”

Long respected within the art world as a painter’s painter, Von Heyl is now receiving wider recognition, thanks to a pair of traveling shows. The first U.S. museum survey of her work is at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston from March 21 to July 15, while another, larger exhibition is at the Tate Liverpool from February 24 to May 27. For the moment Von Heyl’s market remains more steady than spectacular, with her new canvases priced around $90,000 at the galleries 1301PE in Los Angeles (6150 Wilshire Blvd.; 323-938-5822) and Friedrich Petzel in New York (535/537 W. 22nd St.; 212-680-9467). As the artist herself puts it, her work is “an acquired taste—people have taken a long time to get into it because it really benefits from a second look.” Or even better, a third.