Thilo Heinzmann

Bortolami is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Thilo Heinzmann, the artist’s third solo show at the gallery. Heinzmann’s work displays an impressive variety of formal and material means, while also forcefully articulating the consistency with which Heinzmann deploys his artistic interests across this full spectrum:

A relief-arrangement of small, irregular marble blocks; hues of powdery pigment; sculpted rags of hessian in flesh-tone dyes; sharply perforated metal surfaces; intricately shaped and then glazed porcelain bodies, reminiscent of forms of nature; cotton fluff; slabs of styrofoam; sprinkled dispenses of oscillating, colored resin that in some places sit on white grounds, oozing effects of liquidity, while in other parts being soaked into the textile on which they have landed, coloring the material from within its very woven structure; the reflective splashes of poured and hardened zinc; and even mere traces of movement left on otherwise minutely worked, matte planes of black, which now achieve the improbable – to catch refractions of light, in their full darkness.

Against the ground of this rich diversity emerges a set of formal echoes and correspondences through which the various strands and specimens of Heinzmann’s work answer each other: the marble’s white responds to the white tones of glazed and non-glazed porcelain, to the color of cotton and styrofoam, and to that of smooth metal surfaces. The superimposed, zigzagging splashes of zinc emerge as variations on a motif that also includes the expanses of pigment, breathed onto the ground of the picture’s support, and the curved paths of the resin. And the form-creating gestures on black stand as correlates to the shapes cast in hessian and zinc. Across this remarkable range, artistic form here displays its binding power, while also articulating the very wealth of colors, matter, textures, which Heinzmann’s art steals from the world.