The drawing O.T. (Nail Salon) by Stefanie Heinze is part of a new group of paintings, drawings & collages currently on view at Petzel Gallery. This exhibition titled Mortar (the cute ones shouldn’t go unnoticed), is the artists first solo exhibition since relocating from Berlin to New York last year. In this new series Heinze explores epistemological frameworks and the fluidity of truth, interrogating conventional paradigms of representation. Her works envision paintings as sanctuaries for visual language, creating spaces where these languages can exist and repose within what she perceives as an existential state of being.

Heinze’s artistic process begins with the creation of small-scale drawings and collages, which serve as the genesis for her expansive works on canvas. These sketches, while eventually becoming distinct works, are special contingent objects - commonly secret asides, an age-old artistic tool - that offer intimate windows into the artists evolving process. Translated into large-scale tracings, they undergo multiple transformations as her canvases gradually take shape. Over multiple months, Heinze builds her compositions, layering line and color to produce enigmatic scenes of temporal suspension.

Heinze's imagery is invested with both cerebral and corporeal experiences, manifesting a surreal or otherworldly quality. She navigates transformative and generative states of depiction, merging the mundane with the inexplicable. She invokes a sense of strangeness that both disorients and captivates, eschewing clear categorization as either figurative or abstract, her works come into being as similarly familiar and mysterious.

Heinze has a forthcoming exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 2024 that will be accompanied by an extensive exhibition catalogue.