The largest U.S. exhibit of pioneering artist Charline von Heyl’s Snake Eyes featuring over 30 large-scale paintings that showcase her influence on contemporary art will be on display at Hirshhorn Museum through April 21.
Von Heyl is considered one of the most inventive artists working today. “Von Heyl has earned international acclaim for continually rethinking the possibilities of contemporary painting. Her cerebral yet deeply visceral artworks upend longstanding assumptions about composition, beauty, and narrative. Drawing inspiration from a vast and surprising array of sources—including literature, pop culture, metaphysics, and personal history—von Heyl creates paintings that are seemingly familiar yet impossible to classify, offering, in her words, ‘a new image that stands for itself as fact’,” says the exhibit brief.
The major multinational exhibition is organized in collaboration with Deichtorhallen Hamburg. It highlights von Heyl’s works produced since 2005, including recent ones that reflect new developments in her constantly evolving practice. “Together, Snake Eyes shines an international spotlight on one of today’s most dynamic painters and demonstrates the vitality and limitless possibilities of painting,” the exhibit brief adds.
The exhibit has been curated by Hirshhorn Senior Curator Evelyn C. Hankins and Dr. Professor Dirk Luckow, general director at the Deichtorhallen, with curatorial assistance from Sandy Guttman.
According to Martha Schwendener from The New York Times, “her paintings have an instantaneous effect on your vision and perception.” The Washington Post columnist Sebastian Smee wrote in its review that “all in all, this brilliant show reminds us how much life there is in looking, feeling and thinking through paint.”
Born in Germany in 1960, von Heyl studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She took part in the Cologne art scene in the 1980s and later moved to New York in 1995.
Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Kunstmuseum Bonn.