Arrive and Disperse: Kylie Heidenheimer’s Perpetual Gesture
Arrive and Disperse : Kylie Heidenheimer’s Perpetual Gesture.
Catalog essay on the occasion of Heidenheimer’s solo exhibition, Here, Elsewhere, Private Public Gallery, Hudson, New York, November 29, 2025 - January 11, 2026. Catalog release date: January 3, 2026.
Kylie Heidenheimer is a painter engaged in enacting the processes of construction and deconstruction in any given composition and how these two seemingly opposing forces can be held in taut suspension. Abstraction is neither the cause of alternate pictorial resolution or the effect of it, and in that sense Heidenheimer’s approach acknowledges the absolute freedom inherent in such non-representational thinking of the kind explored by such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze. In his recently published seminars On Painting, Deleuze sketches out an analogy for painting’s inception- or a pre-history of the visual- which he terms painting’s “catastrophe”[1]. His is a concept of a kind of painterly “big bang” from whence multiple stylistic “frames” and “diagrams” evolve dependent upon any individual painter’s awareness and temperament. Given this analogy, Heidenheimer’s sensibility situates in an indeterminate space between painting’s inherent catastrophe and its constantly evolving attempts at formal resolution. Her conceptual indetermination and formal irresolution, rather than evincing a limit, imbue her canvases with a sense of vital, perpetual becoming.
Consider a work such as Wire (2023), for example. This squared composition is dominated on its left by an encroaching Prussian blue stain counterpoised with a loose scaffolding of staccato vertical and horizontal “dashes” on its right. The dashes are expressionistically “noted” in deeper tones of the same hue so that the painting is essentially a monochrome with the exception of the light raw canvas ground which is further modulated by streaks of white. The overall effect is a dramatic conflict between the phenomenally arrived- at and the stridently built. Heidenheimer keeps a productive stasis between these opposing forces enacting a kind of separate yet intrinsically entangled purpose. And, as if to refute a pat compositional equilibrium via assimilative hue, with Basin (2024) the artist veers more toward a multicolored layering of slashing lines that rise in density to a red ochre tangle. Here the tension is more distributed across the canvas and its lateral stolidity is reinforced by a subtly suggested primary hue triad, although each version of red, yellow, and blue are present in their unsaturated states. The range of Heidenheimer’s tactical approach between these two works - from the obsessive expressionist mark opposed to a stained interjection in the former to that “striking” gesture dominating the latter is evidence of her restless search for a vital expression unique to each of her paintings. Her ever- evolving approach ensures that her gestural vocabulary remains fluid, deftly sidestepping familiar cliches of stylistic calcification.
The opportunity to view a suite of Heidenheimer’s paintings in this exhibition is a significant one, in that the distinctive qualities between them, in process, gesture and palette help to concentrate and clarify her ever-inquisitive stylistic evolution. What’s fascinating about this dynamic is its robust reinvestment of prior gestural tropes that recur within each discrete work. One becomes acclimated to readily identify the slashing dashes of linear inscription, the errant congresses of ad hoc stains and smudges and the almost graffiti -like layering of multiple different expressionist “tags” as recurrent, to differing degree, across Heidenheimer’s oeuvre. Consider the elegant summary of all of the above, as an example, in Rise ( 2024). Despite its relatively small scale (24”x 24”) this composition grandly exemplifies the artist’s experienced control of the painterly “catastrophe”. While dominated on its left by an ascendant orange stain, its right is occupied by a dense conglomeration of notational smudges in red, green and blue. As in Wire, this formal contest is held in perpetual check by the way in which Heidenheimer deftly navigates between the incipient and fully-developed painterly gesture. This she accomplishes, among other attributes, via the scale of her mark making and the delicacy with which she attends to her grounds. In this instance the ground is pushed slightly back and to the top of the composition in a blithe combination of a Naples yellow expanse boosted by splotches of pure white. So that, besides the obvious gestural struggle between the made and arrived -at, a similar chord of the artist’s active and passive sensibility arises in her tactful color modulations.
In an interview conducted mutually with artists Elisabeth Condon and Nicole Parcher during the Covid lockdown, Heidenheimer clarified her position on gestural indeterminacy in a characteristically generous and open-minded way:
“I see space as malleable. It intertwines with materiality in the work…Space also for me depicts infinitude. Elements within the work ultimately sync with a primary wresting and twisting of space/ materiality… Surface is seemingly in perennial dialog with the bottomlessness of its infinite opposite. …I want weight and mass, without literally depicting it, to have the impact of a heaved boulder pushing through to the other side of a canvas. The more I think of multi-directionality… Finally, in an ironic turn, it is perhaps conceptually more circumscribed than material and literally tangible things. Unlike actual space, there are likely more limits to depicting and marking ideas of infinitude. Perhaps these limits too are a form of structure.”[2]
Heidenheimer’s plainly articulated yet rigorously considered sensibility situates her engagement with abstraction and expressionism beyond the confines of affective display. Her practice opens onto a generative field—a kind of quantum articulation of painterly space itself. The works gathered here both enact and unsettle this articulation, inviting the viewer into a continual process of spatial negotiation: a shared act of both occupying and constituting space.
Tom McGlynn
November 2025
[1] Gilles Deleuze, On Painting, University of Minnesota Press, 2025 pp1-27
[2] Excerpted from a three-way written interview conducted with artists Elisabeth Condon, Kylie Heidenheimer and Nicole Parcher on the occasion of virtual open studios, The Clemente, New York, NY in 2021.