Perrotin is pleased to present What do you want me to bring you: I am going to town, Thilo Heinzmann’s third solo exhibition at Perrotin Paris. The exhibition presents a new body of pigment paintings alongside three new works from his Aicmo series made from industrial aluminum sheets shaped like paintings.
“I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.”
Text by Paul Laster
Thilo Heinzmann gets painting. Like Willem de Kooning famously said of it, “I don’t paint to live; I live to paint.”
All that Heinzmann had ever wanted to be was an artist. Before entering the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 1992 he was an accomplished figurative painter, but he came to school to pursue abstraction. While taking art class with Thomas Bayrle, where his classmates were Haegue Yang and Thomas Zipp, he worked as an assistant to Martin Kippenberger, putting his figurative painting skills to use while rejecting them in his own work. Bayrle’s youngest master student—completing the program in just five years— Heinzmann was making breakthrough works even before leaving school. He made his initial chipboard painting and the first of his signature Pigment Paintings in 1994. He had arrived as an abstract artist and left as an experimental one. With an interest in the Zero movement, he worked his way through Yves Klein and immediately went on to Lucio Fontana, seeing humor in his work—perhaps even a bit of Dadaist irreverence.
Experimenting with every new work for each additional show, he wanted to get beyond the canvas and wooden stretcher. Employing a variety of materials—ranging from aluminum, Styrofoam, and glass to leather, fabric and fur—he explored existential space with a fascination for substances related to nature and humanity.
His exhibition What do you want me to bring you: I am going to town brings together three series of work from his highly diverse oeuvre. For the artist, it’s a way to discuss town, the urban realm rather than the countryside, where people go to escape. Although his work may be abstract, he creates it to talk about life today and the struggles we must confront. Heinzmann employs an abstract language to speak philosophically with emotion.
Collecting thousands of pigments and materials from all around the world, he lives with them in the studio until they find their way into the work. His Aicmo works are created on shaped honeycomb aluminum structures. He cuts and punctures the surface to change the painterly mark-making into something more physical. Adding dangling pieces of colored leather rather than brushed on paint, he makes a painting that can change with the wind.
A large slashed and punched Aicmo, which has yellow parchment creating a swath of color on the white surface and adding a sunny hue from the back through the punched holes, is suspended on the ceiling of the first room of the gallery, just above the entryway. Heinzmann changed it from a wall piece for the show—wanting its face-like structure to be looking at the viewers, welcoming them into the exhibition unfolding below.
Two more Aicmos—one with a chunk of yellow parchment looking like a bruised eye, a piece of blue leather hanging from a gash like a tear, and a pale pink bit of leather that’s visible through multiple cuts hanging below the bottom of the piece like a handkerchief in hand and the other, which resembles a battered ghost with splashes of burgundy and blue leather floating through the next room—are hung on pink painted walls that modify the usual white box ambience of the gallery space.
While these works play important supporting roles, the main characters of the show are the Pigment Paintings, of which there are three groups. The first group consists of three large paintings with bursts of color and lively lines that trail across the bright white, thickly rolled canvas, with blurry spots of yellow that hint at the sun shining through turbulent skies. The two other sets of paintings are encased in Plexiglass shielding to protect their surfaces from being touched. Three large to medium-sized ones are installed on the walls of the last room of the exhibition, while the paintings in a smaller format, which have a much darker palette of brushed pigments with linear scarring made with a finger or another type of tool, are resting on easels. The artist imagines each easel, which he designed and had made, as a surrogate for a person making an offering of its displayed painting.
He made the first pigment paintings in response to seeing artists— including Jorge Pardo, who was visiting Frankfurt when Heinzmann was attending the Städelschule—working on computers. The process of adding color and activating it with the cursor led the young German artist to invent an analog way of releasing pigment on the wet, paint-rolled surface of canvas. He nearly gave up this process, but decided to revisit it in 2008 when an art dealer from New York spotted an earlier piece in his studio and offered him a show if he included these types of paintings in it.
Mostly preplanned, particularly with the choice of pigment colors, the paintings are created in a series of actions and reactions with an element of chance at play, for example, from the wind outdoors, where part of the painting process takes place, supported by two assistants shifting the canvas around in space. The artist has to get into a creative, concentrated zone, one in which he is actively creating—a process that is both cerebral and playful, and involves a highly controlled form of chaos. Painting abstractly like De Kooning and harnessing chance like John Cage, while also employing brushwork like Pierre Bonnard, Heinzmann creates paintings like a computer, but more brilliantly by the artist’s hand.
Always seeking something new, each work of art is different—following a set of open-ended rules, like Fontana, what he makes is never the same.
Born in 1969 in Berlin, Germany
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Thilo Heinzmann attended Städelschule in Frankfurt from the early 1990s in the class of Thomas Bayrle. During that time he also assisted Martin Kippenberger. A significant voice in a generation of German painters scrutinizing the medium and its history, his inventive, precise works are driven by an inquiry into what painting can be today. Using chipboard, styrofoam, nail polish, resin, pigment, fur, cotton wool, porcelain, aluminum and hessian, Heinzmann has for the last twenty-five years worked on developing new paths and an unique visual language in his practice. He is interested in the presence that each work creates, which is further enhanced by his paintings’ powerful tactile qualities. It invites the viewer to notions on some essentials: composition, surface, form, color, light, texture, and time. In 2018 he was appointed professor of painting at Universität der Künste in Berlin.
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