Julie Zener Gallery

View All Available Nicole Heinzel’s Artwork on Julie Zener Gallery @ Artsy

Nicole Heinzel lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Heinzel studied art, design and photography at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in the United Kingdom.

Heinzel was born in 1969 to German parents who at this time had emigrated to Bengasi, Libya. The family then moved to Iran and at the start of the revolution were transferred to Trinidad and Tobago. In 1978 they moved to Scotland, UK, where the artist spent two decades of her life. After spending eight years in London, Heinzel moved to Berlin, Germany in 2002.

Her career includes a large span of international exhibitions.

Heinzel’a works will debut in the US at Julie Zener Gallery this December 2017.

NICOLE HEINZEL

ARTISTS STATEMENT (2017)

My work revolves around the deconstruction and re-construction of my own reality. I extract non-essential and superfluous detail and color. I blur the perception of medium: photography, painting, drawing, etching, tapestry… I explore how we decode and interpret reality, or how our waking consciousness continuously deconstructs and reconstructs it.

 

I photograph landscapes; vast and limitless expanses of water, forests, grasslands or snow covered Alpine mountains, but also architectural spaces such as abandoned GDR holiday homes or the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau. Places and spaces which are heavily laden with the light and dark of history, the known and the unknown. Light is always the starting point.

 

The image is then disassembled; superfluous information such as color and detail is extracted digitally, prints are made and then ‘recreated’ through the very human act of painting or drawing, through a mixture of freehand and tracing, fusing digital and analogue, or human and machine.

 

The resulting paintings are uncertain, fragmented and ambiguous glimpses into an alternate universe, that challenge the observer to ask is this abstract or realism? Is this a painting, a photograph, a print, a drawing or even a tapestry? What is solid, what is void? I walk many tightropes in my work, and avoid it from being placed into a definite category. I hope to blur the lines, and challenge the accepted order of things using a quiet, contemplative and visually poetic language.

 

The LINEscapes are an ongoing series of paintings that have become such a part of myself that the color fields and the lines flow directly from my subconscious and directly onto the canvas. I completely surpass the digital aspect. The process is repetitive, meditative and lengthy. The large formats require endless walking, back and forth, a very physical process where I sometimes remind myself of a caged zoo animal lulling itself into trancelike state of mind. I cut lines into the wet paint using a knife with a long handle thence the first layer has dried I add a second color, which is caught in the grooves of the first. The superfluous paint is removed revealing the lines. The process can be compared to a huge etching. The process is additive, subtractive, destructive, and of course creative.