Kati Heck, Macht, los (2021), via Sadie Coles HQ
In her second exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ, artist Kati Heck has brought forth a new group of paintings and drawings centered around the horse, using the animal as both historical interpolation and metaphor for human psychology.Â
Heck, whose paintings present as complexly overlaid architectural environment, create works that draw on a range of modes and interpretations of the horse over the course of art history, arriving at a form that twists history around its various constructions. Horses appear in various guises (one of them carrying a human cargo in the barrel of its abdomen), together with knights in shining armor and – by comic contrast – a man’s sweating head, supported by tiny legs. In precisely executed yet open-ended scenes, she subverts the traditional associations of the subject – above all, the horse as a symbol of masculine power and prestige – and instead presents it as an expression of feminine resistance.
Kati Heck, Bonnie Bonne Bon (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
Kati Heck, Einladung (Selbst im Mantel)Â (2021), via Sadie Coles HQ
The paintings hang on free-standing triangles of metal pipes, seemingly transposed off the gallery walls so as to hang mid-air, creating a method of exhibition that poses the work as equally otherworldly to the subject matter presented. The ingrained symbolism of the horse is likewise transposed into surreal, allegoric scenarios. In one scene, Macht, los,a horse with a flowing mane is imagined driving its hooves into the ground, arrested mid-gallop, although the wooden prosthesis in one of its legs betrays a concealed artifice that undercuts the romantic aura. The horse seems to be preparing to rear up, yet is depicted in the moments before, alluding to heroic cowboy images while keeping the works somewhat decentered. In another work, a pony struggles under the weight of man in a vest (a kind of modern-day Bacchus), while in the background, a friezelike scene of cavalry and nude soldiers suggests a more elevated ‘classical’ genre.
Kati Heck, Bonnie Bonne Bon (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
Heck’s work poses the body, both human and nonhuman, in a unique negotiation with history, each form echoing off each other into a free-associative complex of cultural images and analogs. The show closes July 3rd.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Kati Heck at Sadie Coles HQ [Exhibition Site]
