Charline von Heyl in Conversation with Kaja Silverman
Thursday, February 9 | 6:30 pm @ Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
On the occasion of The Institute of Contemporary Art’s survey of Charline von Heyl’s work, the artist will speak with Kaja Silverman about her work. This conversation builds on the exchange published in the catalog for the exhibition at the ICA. There von Heyl states, "At the core of my being in the world, and my being an artist, is this feeling of falseness, which feels paradoxically like the only truly existential sense of self left, or possible." Von Heyl is a painter whose vibrant, insistent, enigmatic work demonstrates that painting is still intensely relevant in contemporary art. Her paintings are not abstractions of objects or figures; instead, she is interested in creating a "new image that stands for itself as a fact." With their dynamic energy, their contradictions and reversals, and their intentional confusion of foreground and background, these paintings require (and desire) careful looking but refuse to yield to the impulse to name, identify, and define. As the artist says, "It is about the feeling that a painting, or any work of art, can give—when you can't stop looking because there is something that you want to find out, that you want to understand... Good paintings have this tantalizing quality. And once you turn around, you absolutely cannot recapture them. They leave a hole in the mind, a longing."
