Kylie Heidenheimer: Attenuated Figuration
by Etty Yaniv, Art Spiel, March 18, 2026
Kylie Heidenheimer at her Private Public Gallery solo show “Here, Elsewhere”, November 29, 2025 - January 24, 2026, photo by Emily Berger.
Posted on March 18, 2026
by Etty Yaniv
Kylie Heidenheimer: Attenuated Figuration
Kylie Heidenheimer came to painting through an early interest in art restoration. After high school, she attended Grinnell College in Iowa, where she studied chemistry, art history, and 2-D studio art. Following her freshman year, she spent the summer as an art restoration intern at the Museum für Völkerkunde in then West Berlin. While there, she began drawing and painting with gouache on paper on her own. By the end of that summer, she had decided to pursue art seriously. Not long after, her focus shifted to oil painting.
Her path toward abstraction grew out of a strong foundation in figurative work. After her sophomore year at Grinnell, she returned to St. Louis to attend art school at Washington University. The core program was rigorous and heavily figurative, with intensive anatomy drawing and figure sculpture classes, followed by a return to painting.
What drew you to abstract painting?
When I moved to New York and was painting on my own, things gradually became more abstract. I still, to this day, think quite figuratively. The abstraction comes in, I believe, from assembling various marks and open areas together that are broad in expanse. In that regard, what I do might also be viewed as a distorted, stretched, or attenuated figuration.
Let’s start with your recent solo show, Here, Elsewhere, at Private Public Gallery. Tell us about your body of work in this exhibition.
The works in the show were made between 2023 and 2025, but most pieces were started much earlier. I work out of two studios, one on the Lower East Side of NYC and the other Upstate. Each is about 300 square feet. I was fortunate that the person who makes my stretcher bars could handle orders and deliveries to both places. Because of the two studios, I was able to have breaks from one space while working in the other. This provided the opportunity for repeated “fresh looks” at the body of work in each studio, which informed the work in the show. I think the latter helped with seeing things in totality. The expansive open areas, marks, and lines within the works, at least in part, came from this process. A sense of shifting scrims that overlap, bulge, and retract within a receding ethereality developed. Some of the edges land within the canvases at times, and dart off of them at others. The show title, Here, Elsewhere, represents how the immediate and what is further away, ultimately interweave. Abstraction is certainly a force in allowing this to take place.
Let’s take a closer look at Chasm and Net (from ‘Pointing to’ Paintings II). What is the genesis of each painting? How do you see the relationship between them?
Actually, they could not have started out more differently. Chasm, 2024, grew from revisiting an earlier painting, Spectacle. The original piece was created when I was still working in acrylic, circa 2009. At that juncture, I was ceasing to pour paint in pieces and had missed the use of the hand. The use of the hand came back in the form of both loose marks and a line that felt drawn and incised within the surface. Additionally, Net, 2025, began on the floor. Similar to my earlier work, it began with pours. With regard to the two paintings’ relationship to one another, I think together, they speak to dissonance, as Bill Arning phrased it in his Two Coats of Paint review of the show.
Chris Freeman of Private Public hung the exhibition. He found, unlike my earlier work, that the pieces in this show were self-contained, within their own worlds. Accordingly, when hung side by side, they did not speak to one another in a conversational sense. He shaped the show’s installation in accordance with this dissonant dynamic. For example, when Chasm and Net were hung, they brought more together than when apart; the space between them created a kind of force field. Not a magnetic one, but rather one of compressed resistance. I saw the paintings in the show as furthering these dynamics within themselves.
Installation view, Here, Elsewhere, Private Public Gallery. Photo by Luca Pearl Khosrova
You seem to work on long-term series of paintings, for instance, Reverse Paintings I from 2014 to 2017, then Reverse Paintings II from 2018 to 2020. Tell us a bit about this body of work – what does Reverse stand for? How do you see a “series” as complete, and can you describe how the shift occurred in 2018?
Reverse stands for a lot of the structure or armature that remains as the dominant visual in the final piece. This allows the viewer to look down and into the work, as well as provides an awareness of what remains outside. I do not see a shift in focus between bodies I and II. Splitting the work up is a way of marking their making through time. It makes each portfolio easier to view in total, as well as to curate. I see a series as complete (in this case, moving from Reverse Paintings II 2020–2018 to “Painting To” Paintings I 2025-2021) when a shift in thinking about them begins to assert itself. I have become more aware, starting around 2021, of how my traversing the canvas from one end to another has entailed a kind of ‘selflessness’ on behalf of any given element in a piece. A mark, for example, seems less about asserting itself than it does about deflection. Namely, it ‘points to’ its surroundings, whether it is the space around it, another similar mark, or a contrasting shape.
Your earlier paintings were made with acrylic. I am looking at your Raised Grid Paintings (1998-2004). What drew you to acrylic, and how did this medium impact your approach to abstract painting? Let’s look closely at Night (2001) as an example.
I began painting in acrylic around 1995. I was without a studio and working at home in my apartment. Since I was messy and capable of spreading paint and fumes anywhere, working in water-based paint became necessary in the smaller confines. It was also more immediate. Acrylic proved effective even after getting a studio again in 1998. I could come in at night after my day job and layer things without worrying about everything not being dry or muddying up. Works such as Night, 2001, were a later evolution in the use of acrylic. The latter was mixed with medium and pushed through a screen. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, broad, ecumenical approaches and interferences, such as those provided by the screens, lent themselves to my work leaning towards the abstract. I am not sure acrylic, per se, had anything to do with this shift. I think that my tendency to see and do things on a broader scale is not tied to any medium.
In Hunter College’s darkroom, in doing late-night graduate school photo murals, developing the murals was a collaborative process where two people were needed to roll large pieces of exposed photo paper up and down in a narrow chemical-filled trough. It was here that someone commented on how abstract my work was, and this was with a Diana camera!
What was driving me in 2001 and my body of work at the time was the beginning of the removal, but not the elimination of the hand. The screen served as an interference with that. I was after a dialogue between what was die-cut and manufactured, and what can grow from the force of the hand and body. “Sans hand” further accelerated around 2004-5 when screens and interfering objects no longer touched the surface of the support. In those instances, what became the ensuing “Pour Mask” series, the emphasis was upon achieving a pristine quality. I had just driven through the Adirondacks for the first time and was taken by how untouched the waters and surroundings were.
Kylie Heidenheimer, Night, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
You transitioned to painting in oil. Your Mark/Tack Paintings (2007-2013) seem to mark this phase. Tell us about this transition period. What drew you to oil, and how has it impacted your paintings?
Transitioning away from the pristine and back to the mark in acrylic worked fine initially. This changed around 2010, when colors in the work became brighter and more saturated. This emphasized acrylic’s plastic and non-breathing qualities for me. Neither were things that I was after. Returning to oil paints and their organic qualities eliminated a lot of this.
Let’s go back to your recent ‘Pointing to’ paintings. You divide this body of work into two, but they occur over the same period of time (‘Pointing to’ Paintings II from 2025-23 and ‘Pointing to’ Paintings 2025 – 2021). Let’s take a look at Inlet, 2025 (‘Pointing to’ Paintings II) and Embark, 2025 (‘Pointing to’ Paintings I).
“Pointing to’ Paintings II represents the work that was in the Private Public show. I find it interesting that you chose Inlet, 2025, from that body of work to discuss, as that piece essentialized the work in the exhibition for me the most. It did this, perhaps, by being smaller in scale than many, at 36 x 36 inches. For these reasons, it was the image for both the show’s card and the catalog cover. I also saw its inspiration as the most straightforwardly art-historical of all the show’s work, namely the influence of Edvard Munch’s landscapes. I had seen a show at The Clark with them in the summer of 2024. I could not believe how great they were and how little I knew about them.
Kylie Heidenheimer, Inlet, 2025, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, photo by Adam T. Deen
Kylie Heidenheimer, Embark, 2025, oil on canvas, 75 x 60 inches, photo by Adam T. Deen
This painting and another of the same size, Delve, 2025, were inspired by cave paintings. Longing is a powerful force in my work, and cave painting generally embodies it. There is also a sense of looking out and beyond in cave painting. In Embark, there are prominent formal sections on the right that run off the canvas. On the left, an animalistic figure gazes beyond.
You also make prints and work on paper. Can you tell us about your approach to working on paper versus canvas or wood? Has working on paper informed your painting, and how does it differ from painting for you?
At one point, paper did inform canvas for me. Its tight weave allowed me to make the soaks and marks I wanted in ways that held up and were not overtaken by the paper. I began to choose tighter canvas and linen weaves as a result. The question of paper vs. canvas also led me to the dilemma of drawing vs. painting. I increasingly – but not entirely – find the two to be indistinguishable. This might explain the untouched areas in the paintings. We readily accept such areas in drawing. For me, they can also take place in painting.
Regarding prints, while I’ve been making monoprints on and off since 2016, the incised-like marks in the paintings speak to a longing for intaglio. I had done quite a bit of intaglio work as both a graduate and an undergraduate student. It has resurfaced in combination with monoprints recently in the form of dry point. Lastly, I also work with Yupo, which differs greatly from canvas for me. It is as if paint were gliding across a kitchen counter.
How do you see your work in the context of art historical and current abstract painting?
My inkling that a painting is contemporary/ current – abstract or otherwise – is that it does not quite come from a place where painting was before. I know that is a very broad and expansive definition. It may relate to, and have kinship with, modernity or earlier periods, but its reason for being differs. In this respect, language within painting serves as a vessel(s). One’s love of earlier art may be within it, but memory and longing distort and evolve raison d’êtres between then and now. Historically speaking, Cezanne is a major force. I see him as much a builder as I do a painter. He is the father of an in-real-time way of working. With regard to current work, I see my work in the context of that of Janis Provisor, Brenda Goodman’s new and earlier work, Laura Newman, Jeffrey Bishop, and Per Kirkeby. These are just a few examples.
About the artist: Kylie Heidenheimer interweaves density and atmosphere across breadths and depths in her abstract paintings. She has a BFA from Washington University, St. Louis and an MFA from CUNY Hunter College. Her work has been the subject of solo shows at Private Public Gallery, Hudson, NY; Galerie Gris, Hudson, NY; Thomas Jaeckel Gallery, NYC; Ohio Northern University, Ada, OH; The Italian Academy at Columbia University, NYC, and J.C. Flowers, NYC. She has participated in group exhibitions at Icebox4, Brooklyn; Zürcher Gallery, NYC; 56 Henry, NYC; Waterhouse & Dodd Gallery, NYC; O’Flaherty’s, NYC; Furnace Art on Paper Archive, Falls Village, CT; UT Knoxville, Knoxville, TN; and the Miller School of Architecture, Columbus, IN. Heidenheimer was a visiting artist at St. Mary’s College, Maryland, in 2025 and 2024, and a Yaddo guest in 2020 and 2016. She co-curated with Camilla Fallon the 2019 exhibition Incise, Echo and Repeat at Abrazo Gallery, NYC. She lives and works in NYC.
About the writer: Etty Yaniv is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and founder of Art Spiel. She works in installation, painting, and mixed media, and has shown her art in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Since 2018 she has published interviews and reviews through Art Spiel, often focusing on under recognized voices and smaller venues. More about her art can be found at ettyyanivstudio.com and on Instagram @etty.yaniv
Kylie Heidenheimer’s Ecstatic Dissonances
by Bill Arning, Two Coats of Paint, December 15, 2025
Kylie Heidenheimer’s ecstatic dissonances
December 15, 2025 9:27 am
Kylie Heidenheimer, Swell, diptych, 2025, oil on canvas, 75 x 120 inches
Contributed by Bill Arning
Private Public Gallery has earned its reputation for mounting deeply considered exhibitions of painting that honor artists who have spent decades refining their own private grammars of mark and color. Entered through a small garden – an architectural prelude that feels almost ceremonial – the gallery offers a perfect threshold for work that rewards slow, attentive looking. “Here, Elsewhere,” Kylie Heidenheimer’s first solo exhibition there, is fully in that lineage. Working with Chris Freeman, the gallery’s proprietor and an artist/gallerist in the Betty Parsons tradition, Heidenheimer has conceived a taut, resonant statement: six large-scale abstractions flanking the room and, anchoring the space like a cinematic overture, and one monumental diptych.
The diptych, Swell, spanning ten feet across its two panels, stands slightly apart from its companions – out of step with Heidenheimer’s usual strategies and all the more striking for it. The painting unfolds as a rising, breathing symphony of greens and blues, irresistibly landscape-inflected. The experience is luscious and consoling; the eye enters, drifts, and rests in washes of atmospheric calm. The unpainted lower-right section, rather than reading as void or rupture, becomes a kind of oasis, a meditative clearing. In Park, prompted by a recent visit to Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, one might expect Swell’s lyric quiet to continue. In fact, however, Swell is the only work in the show that resists Heidenheimer’s signature interior contradiction. In Park and elsewhere, she makes a mark only to hunt, mischievously, for the least predictable rejoinder. The painting crackles with carnival clamor – rides, thrills, chromatic noise. She seems temperamentally drawn not to pastoral reverie but to the ecstatic dissonances of free jazz.
Kylie Heidenheimer, Park, 2025, oil on canvas, 75 x 60 inches
Kylie Heidenheimer, Sash 1, 2025, oil on canvas, 68 x 53 inches
Kylie Heidenheimer, Net, 2025, oil on canvas, 88 x 68 inches
The four 75 × 60-inch works along the side walls tease us with nearly but never quite reconcilable kinships. The gallery has hung the most divergent pair side-by-side. The sepulchral, black-and-white Chasm, a gloomy atmospheric descent, rubs shoulders with Net, all staccato verticals, looping outlines, splashes, and jubilant color. One senses the same hand, but also the mercurial weather of Heidenheimer’s studio days. A shared trait – if any can be claimed – is her recurring use of a subtle architectural latticework on which the paint performs its improvisations. Though it risks reading as a modernist trope, the scaffold quickly dissolves into the background as more voluptuous decisions seize your attention.
In his erudite, theory-steeped essay for “Here, Elsewhere,” Tom McGlynn observes: “Rather than evincing a limit, Heidenheimer’s labile approach imbues her canvases with a sense of vital, perpetual becoming.” That feels exactly right. Not unlike the seductively unstable abstractions of Amy Sillman, Keltie Ferris, Charlene von Heyl, or Matt Connors, Heidenheimer’s paintings work against the viewer’s instinct to categorize. They slow perception, invite list-making, and demand a kind of pleasurable forensic engagement: what on earth compelled her to place this mark next to that one? I often failed to reverse-engineer the logic. Her internal monologue seems to whisper, “These don’t belong together, so let’s see what happens.”
Kylie Heidenheimer, Chasm, 2024, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 inches
Rather than describe any single canvas – an almost impossible task – I found joy in trying to determine the sequence of her gestures. In several works, she overlays a full, authoritative brushstroke with another patch of paint nearly identical in scale, causing the form to shift hue once, twice, even three times. The effect is deliciously impish, as though she were taunting the very idea of painterly certainty. Heidenheimer is a beloved presence in the Hudson Valley painting community, and “Here, Elsewhere” marks her most assured, generous, and quietly audacious effort yet – a celebration of intent, play, and the infinite pleasures of looking.
“Kylie Heidenheimer: Here Elsewhere,” Private Public Gallery, 530 Columbia Street, Hudson, NY. Through January 14, 2026
About the author: Bill Arning is a curator, critic, advisor, writer, and itinerant maker of pop up shows based in Old Chatham, New York.
Tags: abstract expressionism, Amy Sillman, Bill Arning, Charlene von Heyl, Keltie Ferris, Kylie Heidenheimer, Matt Connors, Private Public Gallery, Tom McGlynn, Upstate
5 Comments
December 16, 2025 at 4:20 pm
Like the entrance at Private Public, these words offer a threshold into the sumptuous but resistant paintings they describe. A tab to keep open…
December 16, 2025 at 6:04 pm
A perfect match, the show and Bill’s commentary! Clear thinking all the way through.
December 16, 2025 at 6:10 pm
The best art writing makes you want to run out and see the show. I need to check the train schedule!
December 18, 2025 at 7:57 pm
Bill’s translating your paintings into words are a perfect partnership to what we see. He describes what what it must feel like to paint them.
Jean Feinberg
This was the most surprising, beautiful, articulate and insightful analysis of Kylie’s work.
Featured Artist - Kylie Heidenheimer
by NItin Mukul, Epicenter - NYC, February 28, 2025
FEATURED ARTIST
Kylie Heidenheimer
February 28, 2025
WAVE, 2023, oil on canvas, 68 x 53 inches
By Nitin Mukul
This week we welcome Kylie Heidenheimer, a visual artist known for her abstract paintings. Heidenheimer’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galerie Gris in Hudson, NY, 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in NYC and Ohio Northern University in Ada, OH, among others.
Left panel - CANOPY, diptych, 2024, oil on canvas, 66 x 132 inches
She has attended several residencies, including at St. Mary’s College in MD, Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY and The Millay Colony in Austerlitz, NY. Her work has been cited in The New York Times and is in collections throughout the United States, as well as Australia and Sweden. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from CUNY/ Hunter College. She lives and works in New York City.
CHASM, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60 inches
“I alternate open, diaphanous areas with pigment pools and incisive marks in my narrative abstract paintings. Varying scales, layers, angles and directions of lines traversing supports reflect this interchange. Soft and hard edges come to blend, align or separate. Diagram-like inflections serve to establish sections that are taut. Rifts form. Collapsed structures build. Formal elements reside either inside supports or run off edges. A dual focus of what is within pieces and outside them emerges. Physicality of supports will either be affirmed or denied. Tensions between infinity and immediacy form,” she writes.
WIRE, 2023, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
“I use tools from traditional drawing and painting training to realize much of the above. Entrenched marks reflect earlier mosaic study. The incision lines reference intaglio printmaking. The diagrammatic marks are from home economic sewing patterns. Sensibilities in the work can reflect early years in the South and Midwest.
BATH, 2023, oil on canvas, 68 x 53 inches
White daylight burst through and past edges of hanging Spanish moss in North Florida. Missouri and Iowa mist or humidity-filled air was dissonant with the vast fields over which it hovered. These tensions are now integral to the paintings in my studio on the Lower East Side.”
See more of Heidenheimer’s work on her website and Instagram.
Tagged: artartist of the weekNYC artist
Nitin Mukul
Studio Art Tour Class Shines
by Mary McClellan, Bard Lifetime Learning Institute news, Fall 2024
Tom Fitzgibbon: Icebox4
by Etty Yaniv, Art Spiel, July 11th, 2024
Art Spiel, July 11th, 2024
Which Art Fair Is for You?
by Will Heinrich, The New York Times, February 28, 2020
Let Our Critic Be Your Guide
One of New York’s busiest art fair seasons kicks off this week with the Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory. Nine sprawling exhibitions will follow next week. Here’s our critic’s guide.
X-rays, evil trees, divers dazzle at The Clemente
by Nancy Elsamanoudi, amNY, February 13, 2019
by Nancy Elsamanoudi, amNY, February 13, 2019
“Pole Jumper,” by Clintel Steed, oil on canvas, 16 in. x 20 in., 2018.
BY NANCY ELSAMANOUDI | If I could recommend one show to art lovers who might be a somewhat put off by New York City’s slightly insular gallery scene, or to anyone just looking for a great under-the-radar show, it would be the group show currently up at the Abrazo Interno Gallery at The Clemente.
This surprisingly magical, beautifully curated show has a celebratory vibe to it that seems to rebut, with a smirk, grumpy old muggle notions that painting is somehow dead. Indeed, some of the paintings literally seem to be grinning at us.
In Clintel Steed’s painting “3MM Dive,” a rock-hard male diver smiles as he plunges feet first into a sun-soaked scene at the local pool. It’s not quite clear if the central figure is an elite athlete, a scuba diver or an ordinary man dreaming of scuba diving. Either way, this painting is cinematic in its frenetic intensity.
“Lion,” by Mary Jones, oil, spray enamel, gold and silver leaf, feathered wallpaper on canvas mounted panel, 11 in. x 14 in., 2014.
In another painting, “Pole Jumper,” the image shifts depending on how far you stand away from it. From afar, you can make out a blur of a man in with his legs flung in the air. Up close, the image of the flying pole jumper is less readable. If you did not know quite what to look for, you would briefly think it was an abstract painting, until you begin to make out a head here and a leg there.
In JoAnne Carson’s painting “Knotty Pine,” a very different kind character takes center stage. In Carson’s piece, an anthropomorphic, evil-looking red tree with stumps for eyes and a massive, mischievous smile sits in the middle of a whacked-out, punchy landscape with orange clouds and pink foliage.
In another one of Carson’s paintings, “Dream Catcher,” the massive head of a bird peaks out of a very angular-looking and sharp tree set against a turquoise sky filled with cotton candy clouds. These paintings are like stills of Tim Burton’s films on hallucinogens or the three-eyed fish in “The Simpsons.”
“Overstitch,” by Kay Sirikul Pattachote, sewn on paper, 28.5 in. x 20.5 in, 2018.
These paintings’ perversely uncanny humor is suggestive of something menacing, such as the possibility the natural world may be mutating into something unnatural, or synthetic.
Kay Sirikul Pattachote’s paintings, “Overstitch” and “Overstitches #1,” of reddish violet roses in various states of bloom, also speak to the fragility of nature and the human condition but in a far more understated way. In these two works, the materiality of the work is profoundly important to its meaning. In this series, Pattachote combines several pieces of paper in a way that melds drawing, sewing, painting and collage. In parts of the paintings, the thread is clumped together to create a textured surface. In other areas, the thread is sewn in sinuous lines that follow the blossoms’ curves and the stem.
Mary Jones’s small-scale paintings also incorporate collage elements in an unexpected way. In Jones’s piece “Renaissance,” X-rays of a hip bone and spine are integrated with silver leaf, spray paint and oil paint into an overall composition that reads seamlessly as a painting with a cohesive paint surface rather than a collage with disparate elements awkwardly sticking out. “Lion” is another stunning work of hers.
Although Jones’s process may call to mind artists like Merlin James, her images involve a very different, specific and highly idiosyncratic vocabulary.
Over all, this is a phenomenal show filled with great paintings that are in conversation with each other. The show’s works were curated and beautifully installed by Kyle Heidenheimer and Camilla Fallon. The show also includes artwork by Mie Yim, Elisabeth Condon, Walter Schrank, Susanna Coffey, Laura Newman, Amy Manhick, Pinkney Herbert, Camilla Fallon and Kyle Heidenheimer.
“Incise, Echo and Repeat” is on view at Abrazo Interno Gallery at The Clemente (Clemente Soto Velez Cultural & Education Center), at 107 Suffolk St., between Rivington and Delancey Sts., until March 2. The gallery is open daily from 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., except for major holidays. For more information, visit theclementecenter.org .
Kylie Heidenheimer at Galerie Gris
by Amy Griffin, The Albany Times Union, July 3, 2013
by Amy Griffin, Albany Times Union, July 3, 2013
Hudson
Kylie Heidenheimer, whose solo show at Galerie Gris in Hudson opened in June and runs through July 15, is a painter's painter
Which is not to say that she makes paintings solely for other painters to the exclusion of the uninitiated. She is a painter who works in a specialized vernacular, but you don't have to speak the language to appreciate the message. In a show that includes 18 works — paintings on canvas or wood panel and some works on paper — she demonstrates her keen interest in finding dichotomies and the push and pull of space she creates on the canvas, showing evidence of the artist's hand versus withholding it.
Aggressive marks bump up against washes of color. Some brushstrokes almost hover on the surface creating a kind of curtain over layers of more color. Gallery owner Steve Isoz describes the effect she achieves as a kind of shimmer.
Indeed, in "Flame" (2011), bold horizontal and vertical marks in brown and purple recede, some begin to drip and others blur into colors below, giving the quality of a road on a hot day — that wavy quality caused by refraction that shimmers above the surface. The play between the build-up of paint, the washes, drips and strokes, give the painting a depth that sinks in as you look at it.
Heidenheimer, who splits her time between New York City and Hudson, says she's interested in "touching air," something that accounts for the ethereal quality of much of her work. Much of her process is about challenging herself to move out of her comfort zone. For "Flame," she chose purples and browns purposely because she gravitates toward blues. For a series of works on paper, she applied blobs of paint through screens to remove the physical mark-making she often utilizes. On one wall, three large canvases from 2009 show the artist experimenting with gray scale, as drips of black and smears of white suggest scenes obscured by rain on a window.
Isoz opened Galerie Gris on the north end of Warren Street just last year. With a background in advertising and marketing, his foray into running an art gallery grew out of a simple love of art.
An avid collector, he began showing work mostly by artists he'd collected.
Heidenheimer is the first artist he's shown whose work wasn't already familiar to him. It's a direction the gallery is continuing in as Isoz expands his roster.
He plans on mounting only solo exhibitions of artists he finds interesting and giving them six weeks, rather than the typical four. With a schedule common to Hudson galleries, the space is open Thursday through Monday, so the extra two weeks gives the work greater exposure.
Heidenheimer shows regularly in Brooklyn and Manhattan and has been featured in solo exhibitions at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel and Columbia University, both in New York, and at Ohio Northern University.
The show at Galerie Gris is a sort of survey of her work, as Isoz chose a range of pieces, some from as far back as 15 years. The result is an engaging exhibit that exemplifies Heidenheimer's trajectory as an artist — a portrait, in a sense, of an artist not content to dwell in a single, comfortable mode of working.
Amy Griffin is a freelance writer in Delmar.
Shifting Ecologies at The Athens Cultural Center
Roll Magazine, 2015
Riva Weinstein - Hanging by Strings
SHIFTING ECOLOGIES II, as the title suggests, is the second exhibition on the same theme curated by Marianne Van Lent. The first Shifting Ecologies was shown at the Painting Center in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. The premise behind these exhibitions is to see how different artists explore ecological issues and changes to the environment in their work. Shifting Ecologies II features a diverse group of artists from the Hudson Valley and from New York City who embrace a sense of responsibility for defending the environment.
The word “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1878 and originates from the Greek word oikos meaning house or household. Haeckel, a naturalist, biologist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist, expanded the meaning to include habitats. From habitats the word has come to mean the study of the environment: addressing scientifically the interrelationships of living creatures and their conditions, including the biological and physical sciences.
Joan Ades — “Off the Grid”
In Shifting Ecologies II, Joan Ades addresses how technology has altered how we humans communicate with one another in a work wittily titled, Off the Grid. It is a collage as visually delicate as the now obsolete elements from which it is made. The work is pieced together from old maps, phone book listings, and musty fragments left in the 20th century’s wake that, as Ades wrote in her artist’s statement, “call to mind a time when the world was more than a maelstrom of zeroes and ones on a screen, when connections were palpable not virtual, and simplicity prevailed.”
Of her sculptural piece, Hanging by Strings (the image featured above the title), Riva Weinstein says, “it is a contemplation on the fragility of life and shifting eco-systems. Pine boughs are wrapped in mindful meditation.” Weinstein has for some time been making art and doing performances around the number 18 which is symbolic of life in the ancient mystical practice of Gematria. The performances have included invitations to people to join her in walking in circles at various locations around the state including, last winter, in Central Park in NYC. This piece continues with that theme: the wrapping of each bough is counted in increments of 18. More of Weinstein’s work can be seen, until August 8, at the Seligmann Center in Orange County.
One of the natural conditions of life is the alteration — sometimes subtle, often overt — of our environment. Industrial and technological expansions are triggering drastic environmental changes often resulting in mutations, diseases and pollution. The destruction of our earth from global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, genetic engineering, toxic waste and the loss of our forests threaten not only our way of life, but our very survival. Claire Lambe remarked on the ways that pollutants create false positives, such as how fine particles of industrial dust, metals, and chemicals in the air make for “romantic tangerine dawns” and sulfuric acid aerosols create the most dramatic, and reddest, sunsets in her painting Hell from a Distance.
Claire Lambe, “Hell from a Distance”. Mixed media on canvas, 48”x 48”
William McDonough, a leader in promoting sustainability has said, “If everything that is received from the earth can be freely given back, without causing harm to any living system: this is ecology.” Eco artists may address the subject with on-site rigor and activism; painters address it with detached formalism and the language of painting. This show presents the way painters, in particular, are reacting to the current ecology of our planet and our ecological crisis and challenge.
Tasha Depp, “Fukushima Landscape”. Oil on linen, 22x31
Tasha Depp’s eerie men-on-the-moon-on-earth landscape needs no explanation other than to consider that hazmat suits may well be the garb for all of us in the not-so-distant future. Depp is also among the artists in this year’s Samuel Dorsky Museum’s Hudson Valley Artists exhibition at SUNY New Paltz.
The panel, on August 15, will present and discuss the interplay between art and science on the subject of environmental change and will conclude with a group manifestation by the river with multidisciplinary artist, activist, Carrie Dashow. In addition to those already mentioned, the artists in this exhibition include Nancy Azara , Sarah Barker, Kathy Bruce, Tina Chaden, Lisa Crafts, Ford Crull, Peggy Cyphers, Steve Derrickson, Priscilla Derven, Sarah Draney, Stuart Farmery, Deborah Freedman, Mark Gibian, Kylie Heidenheimer, Carter Hodgkin. Linda Horn, Elizabeth Knowles, Ellen Kozak, Barbara Laube, Ingrid Lisowski, Dana Matthews, Theresa Nicholas, Alastair Noble, Gina Occhiogrosso, Al Peters, Sara Pruiksma, Leah Rhodes, Sam Sebren, Phyllis Stoller, Jeff Vanderburg, Marjorie Van Dyke, Marianne Van Lent, and Gordana Vukovic.
Kylie Heidenheimer, “Woods”, acrylic, wax, pigment on canvas, 20”x20”
Curator Marianne Van Lent lives and works in NYC and Athens, NY on the Hudson River. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art and her MFA from Cornell University. Van Lent’s paintings have been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe and inhabit many public and private collections. Recent exhibitions include “Cosmologies”, “Prima Materia” and “Nature Abstracted” at the Painting Center, New York, “Reflected Light”, a solo show at Ulla Surland Fine Art. Her works can be seen online here
This exhibition is made possible in part with public funds from the Decentralization Program of the NYS Council on the Arts, administered in Greene County by the Greene County Council on the Arts through the Community Arts Grants Fund. Additionional funding provided by the Athens Community Foundation.
All images are courtesy of the artists and the Athens Cultural Center.
Featured Image: Riva Weinstein, Hanging by Strings (detail), 2014. Dimensions variable
For more information visit the ACC website: here
Abstract Painting, Though Not Entirely
by Barry Schwabsky, The New York Times, October 25, 1998
by Barry Schwabsky, New York Times (New Jersey edition), October 25, 1998
In its earlier styles, art was generally meant to represent nature. But modern art, abstraction in particular, has often professed to embody its operations. Thus, Jackson Pollock's celebrated affirmation: ''I am nature!''
Today, with technological developments, from digital imaging to cloning, rendering the sense of both reality and its representation less stable and more fluid, artists like those in ''Unnatural Selection: The Transformation of Nature in Abstraction,'' at the Art Gallery at Raritan Valley Community College here, seem to want to hedge their bets. Abstract painting is once again attractive because it can be a little of each, both a representation of reality and a sample of its processes.
The curator, Tom McGlynn, speaks in the exhibition catalogue of the ''uncanny ability of paint to embody natural phenomena in its apparently chance directions and at the same time to present a 'picture' of that embodiment.'' In practice, what this means is that all nine artists practice a self-consciously mannerist form of abstraction, enamored of incongruities and paradoxes, full of references to both the abstract (and not-so-abstract) painting of the recent past and the more diffuse visual cultures of the present -- not only artistic, but commercial, scientific, and so on. The kind of thinking manifest in their works is widespread in today's painting, and while the artists included in ''Unnatural Selection'' are not necessarily the best or the best-known representatives of that thinking, they are valid ones. Mr. McGlynn, an adjunct instructor in fine arts at the college, has not stumbled in avoiding the most obvious choices.
For some of these painters, it seems that color is the primary means for sparking the dialogue (or showdown) between artifice and nature. In Carolanna Parlato's confections of poured and pushed acrylic, the lyrical abstraction of painters of the 1960s and '70s, like Jules Olitski, seems to be turning toxic. As the artist herself notes in the catalogue, it is the way ''murky and Day-Glo colors coagulate'' in discordant abutting passages that creates the paintings' science-fiction feeling -- a feeling pervasive in this exhibition, in fact. The acidic froth of Ms. Parlato's paintings suggests the gaseous surface of an uninhabitable planet.
Elsewhere, it is shape that becomes more important, as in Gary Petersen's paintings in which flat, simple, nondescript forms sprout bumps that can be seen either as exaggerations of normal features, like breasts or noses, or as malignant ones, like cysts or tumors. Taking a cue from the grotesque imagery of Philip Guston's late work, these are essentially cartoons of abstraction, although whether their stolid yet animated shapes should be seen as silly or menacing is kept ambiguous.
This idea of growth as pathological moves from the pictorial content of the painting, as in Mr. Petersen's work, to its physical conformation in a dark, untitled 24-inch square from 1997 by a Los Angeles-based Englishman, Jeremy Kidd, in which globular protuberances disturb the painting's normal planarity.
A pedant might refer to Mr. Kidd's painting as a bas-relief, but a fully three-dimensional extension of painting is here in Madeleine Hatz's ''Desert Fluff'' (1998), a table-top agglomeration of pigments and various other materials, presented as a companion piece to her more conventionally pictorial ''Citrus Sfumato,'' also from 1998. The pieces are similar in palette, but where ''Citrus Sfumato'' is airy and light in feeling, ''Desert Fluff'' breaks that airiness down into something grainy, lunar, debrislike.
''What energizes a painting,'' Mr. McGlynn writes, ''is the painter's awareness of the constant struggle between the actual and the virtual.'' This play between reality and artifice has always been the artist's concern. Marianne Moore once called for poems that would be ''imaginary gardens with real toads in them.'' In Mr. Kidd's painting, possibly the strongest one here, I noticed a housefly frozen still on one of the lavish spills of clear resin that make up most of its immediate surface. Did the unlucky creature landed there while the stuff was still drying and been caught forever, like one of the cigarette butts Pollock is said to have tossed into his paintings now and then as he crouched over them, pouring paint and too caught up himself to stop? Or, given the general atmosphere of nature-as-illusion and artifice-as-natural, could the fly be a fake, like the ones in those trick ice cubes sold in novelty stores? After long minutes, when the seemingly immobilized fly insouciantly buzzed off and deflated these lucubrations, the line between art and reality only seemed blurrier.
''Unnatural Selection'' includes paintings by Bill Doherty, Kylie Heidenheimer, Giles Lyon, James Siena and Mr. McGlynn. Their work is generally a bit closer to familiar styles of abstract painting, whether based on geometry, on pattern or on gesture. Yet in each case there is some understated contradiction, a sense that painting, as Mr. Lyon puts it, ''is where . . . two paradigms meet.''
UNNATURAL SELECTION
The Art Gallery, Raritan Valley Community College, North Branch
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