The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München presents the exhibition by Almut Heise at the Pinakothek der Moderne. The exhibition begins on September 21, 2024 and ends on January 05, 2025.
Image above: Almut Heise, Traum I, 1967, Bleistift, 350 x 290 mm © Almut Heise, Hamburg
The work of Almut Heise (* Celle 1944) is undoubtedly one of the most consistent positions in contemporary art. Undeterred, the painter has created a unique painterly and graphic oeuvre over the decades with stoic composure and nonchalant intransigence that is second to none. Her veristic motifs seem to have fallen out of time, but at the same time captivate with the impressive presence of the interiors and people depicted in a seemingly timeless present that makes us forget the everyday living space of the protagonists. Heise’s brittle subjects raise more questions than they provide answers. There is no doubt that the artist has the format to be an “artistʼs artist” – an appreciation of a special kind.
It is characteristic of Heise that, like few others of her generation, she renounced the heroic gesture of German Art Informel, which had long since congealed into an eclectic formula, with Hanseatic sobriety right from the start of her artistic career. Instead, she fearlessly and confidently countered it with an old-masterly fine painting – a silent rebellion in times of noisy styles that one must be willing to endure without a lobby. Even when she moved to Swinging London for a year in 1970 after studying at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, where leading painters of British Pop Art were teaching at the time, attracted by this shrill style, her stay only clarified her own artistic position, which she had long since found.
What is less well known is that, parallel to her painting, she has been creating a concentrated body of drawings since the mid-1960s, in which she expands the conventional understanding of the art of drawing. She is no longer interested in classical aspects of drawing such as the line or the impasto application of paint, which have been contradictory and seemingly mutually exclusive since the Italian Renaissance. Her colored pencil drawings appear as if they were built up with the drawing medium covering the entire surface. The classical handwriting of the line also loses its significance in her work; instead, the composition appears to be modeled from the surface without any drawing gesture. This contrasts conventional line art with a new concept of drawing.
The concise block of drawings that she continued to produce over the decades, concentrating on interiors and portraits, gives an impression of the precision of her graphic thinking. While the drawings were initially still preparatory studies for the paintings, they increasingly became autonomous master drawings as the work progressed. Looking back today, it is impressive to see how the expression in the portraits subtly changed over the decades. The draughtswoman Almut Heise subtly captures the changing times in the faces of her models and reflects them in the portrait drawings, which seem to be removed from time and space. It is precisely this precise power of observation that makes her drawings so relevant. Heise thus joins a long tradition of graphic introspection of the human face and, without borrowing stylistic elements, creates her own view of people and their portraits.
Characteristic of her unmistakable oeuvre is a light-handed crossover of classical subjects from art history and themes from everyday culture, which permeate her pictorial worlds and portraits and thus, contrary to their stillness, radiate a certain restlessness that drives the viewer.
The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München is delighted that the painter Almut Heise is celebrating the publication of her two-volume catalogue raisonné with an exhibition of her drawings in a classic Kupferstichkabinett.
Curator of the exhibition: Michael Hering, Director of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München
WHEN?
Opening: September 20, 2024, 7 pm
Exhibition dates: Saturday, September 21, 2024 – Sunday, January 5, 2025
Opening hours: Tuesday – Wednesday, Friday – Sunday, 10 am – 6 pm, Thursday, 10 am – 8 pm
WHERE?
Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Straße 40
80333 Munich
COST?
Regular: 10 EUR
Reduced: 7 EUR
Sunday admission: 1 EUR
Day ticket: 12 EUR
Under 18 years: Free admission
