Installation View. All images courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel.

Now through June 3rd, new work by Charline von Heyl will be on view at Capitain Petzel in Berlin, her second solo exhibition with the gallery.  The German artist, who works with drawing, printmaking, and collage, has long drawn on this wealth of material in conjunction with a wide-ranging gestural vocabulary to create a densely layered body of works, shown here through a series of new canvases mixing various modes of illustration and painting.

The artist’s work functions not as a series of surfaces, but interlocking visual events, layering varied approaches towards repeating images or motifs which work in conjunction with her flowing brushstrokes and blurs of color.  These colors and images shift depending on the time of day or the viewer’s perspective, their respective qualities marking a subtle environmental thread that balances against each work’s dynamic surface.  Drawing is a significant part of the artist’s process, though any impression of line or form tends to hide beneath the unstable and heavy layers of charcoal powder, copper, aluminum flakes and dirty pastels.

Rememble (2016).

The exhibition brings together a selection of recent works, creating a continued sense of agitation and stabilization, tension and dissolution.  These works produce stark visual effects and striking contrasts rather that depict any single subject, the artist’s hand playing on the act of painting in conjunction with selected models and repeated themes running throughout her works.  This mode of action allows von Heyl to play on a sense of poetic depth and humor, a visual interrogation of painting by the act of painting itself.

In Local Yokel from Outer Space (2014), for instance, a globular, alien-like face seems to smile from its vantage point inside the frame.  Composed of brightly colored points and dark accents, the painting is at once inviting and menacing.  Considered in different orientations, the abstract subject morphs between readings as an animal, organic object, and the otherworldly.  In Samurai Rabbit (2017), by contrast, the figure of a rabbit stalks across the frame, holding what appears to be a samurai sword.  The red-splattered canvas gives the impression of the exaggerated gore and violence encountered on-screen.  Paired with the gentle symbol of a rabbit walking through a pastoral background, this painting balances the explicit and the abstract in an interesting combination of fine art and entertainment.

Installation View.

Charline von Heyl’s stimulating work is hosted in Capitain Petzel’s open and airy gallery space, giving the viewer ample room to consider these images from afar and up-close.  The artist’s dynamic and provocative pieces come together to demonstrate the pleasure in experience what can happen to a painting under an active gaze.

Her work is on view through June 3rd.

— A. Corrigan

Read more:
Exhibition Page [Capitain Petzel]

Robert Longo, Untitled (Berlin Flag) (2012). Charcoal on mounted paper. All images courtesy of the artist and Capitain Petzel Gallery.

Robert Longo presents a site specific installation, Stand, as his first solo exhibition with Capitain Petzel Gallery Berlin. The show’s timing and location, intentional or unintentional, provide some extra intensity to the already political nature of the exhibition.  Stand, like much of Longo’s work engages themes of politics and power and its effects on society. The show opened during ‘Gallery Weekend’ and alongside this year’s Berlin Biennale, which also focuses on the political power of art. The gallery is located on Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Alle, formerly Stalinalle, famous for being the first “socialist” street of the DDR. Longo’s show utilizes the entirety of the gallery, inside and out, and whether to challenge or just play with the location’s history showcases in its outer windows a black and white drawing of an American flag.

Installation view

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Wade Gutyon, Installation view (2010), Capitain Petzel. All images via Capitain Petzel, Berlin.

Currently on view at Capitain Petzel in Berlin is the gallery’s first solo show of American artist Wade Guyton.  Having once been quoted by New York Times Magazine as saying “I am too lazy to paint,” Guyton continues to press the boundaries of creating art in a digital age by making heavy use of an Epson ink jet printer.  This installation features 86 pieces of paper displayed under glass in fifteen vitrines.  A continuation of an installation at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany in 2010, Guyton has expanded the project to an entire series of blue-tiled vitrines and works on paper.  Although these papers have the appearance of a handcrafted painting, each underwent a process involving multiple printings and digital additions or “drawings.”

More text and images after the jump…

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