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Exhibitions
- Thilo Heinzmann
round the corner
12/06/2021 - 30/07/2021
Composed of three irregular pieces made from roughly cut and split pieces of chipboard, round the corner is Thilo Heinzmann’s seventh solo exhibition at the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery.
Variously leaning against the wall, hanging and floating from the ceiling, the works distributed throughout the main room of the gallery create a peculiar tension both between each other and with the viewer. Belonging to a new body of work that the artist has called ‘Chipboards‘ in direct reference to the material used, the works are placed at a certain distance from their own supports, thus creating a wavering sense of suspension. Somewhat contrary to the primordial coarseness inherent to the abrupt gesture of splitting the boards into irregular shapes, the consistency of the works is leavened by a floating quality lifting the pieces from their supports and rests. These quasi-industrial devices place the works at a slight remove from the wall, modifying but also strengthening an emerging sense of weight and presence.
Like much of the previous work through which Thilo Heinzmann explored the immense field of aesthetics and the act of painting – doing so with a great sense of curiosity for detail, light, form and colour – this new series of works, formless in its configuration, yet uniform in its execution, joining material and technique at a deeper level, proposes something singular, inscrutable and imposing in relation to his previous work.
Commonly used in construction and in do-it-yourself home improvement, chipboard takes on an important role here from a purely material sense. Energetically cut, broken and left with their edges raw, the sections from which the pieces are formed reveal an interior that appears deposited on the surface of the works in the manner of sawdust or wood shavings, small material details that sink between the daubs of resin and occupy sections of the works’ surface. The experience of materiality – fundamental to all of Heinzmann’s work – becomes even more so insofar as the chipboard itself is not only the material, but also the name of the series itself; everything appearing on this material’s surface is inherent to its nature. The particles and resin with which chipboard is industrially manufactured shape not only the density of the board in structural terms, but also its surface in visual terms, made up of components and fragments that emerge from its interior. These irregular shapes now define the pictorial plane of the painting, on which stains, drips and traces of resin appear and give rise to both a brutalist sculptural action and a more expressive, gestural pictorial one.
Over recent decades, Heinzmann has worked with polystyrene foam, glass, leather, leather, burlap, cotton, aluminium, glass, pigment and wood, seeking always to provoke a simultaneous reaction between the tactile and the visual.
With this series of ‘Chipboards’ and their instinctive, primordial, yet utterly refined formalism, a certain notion of the absurd emerges alongside an anarchic juxtaposition between phlegmatic austerity and a thrilling energy, between aesthetic attention to form and a sensorial approach to materiality.