We speak to Stefanie Heinze ahead of her first solo show at Gallery Weekend Berlin about her playful paintings steeped in surprising meanings.
On the farthest wall in Berlin’s sunlit Capitain Petzel gallery is a large scale painting of a strange floating creature. Its eyes are downturned, tightly shut with a slash of bright blue across the lids, tears flowing outwards in sad watery drips. It’s an enchanting painting: sorrowful and sweet — it’s impossible not to be touched by its strangeness and sensitivity at the same time. The painting in question is the title work in Odd Glove (2019), the first solo exhibition by the Berlin-based artist Stefanie Heinze, opening tonight as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin. And this wistful, melancholic thing is, as you probably didn’t guess, an oven glove.
In general, it’s not so easy to guess anything about Heinze’s paintings. They are like nothing you might have seen before. The glove, with its doleful, human expression, is an uncanny thing, yes, something like what the Surrealists might have done, but it’s also playful and cartoonish and somehow far more interesting because of that. Heinze, who studied painting at the University of Leipzig, is quick to tell me that she doesn’t have any inspirations. There are things she likes — painters such as Rose Wiley for example — but really she just “kind of ended up doing it that way.”
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