Stefanie Heinze at LC Queisser

Artist: Stefanie Heinze

Exhibition title: RULER

Venue: LC Queisser, Tbilisi, Georgia

Date: November 8, 2019 – January 15, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and LC Queisser

In proposing a coagulation of relationships that eschew coherence, we distort the straightedge ruler, manipulate it into a web or a bog, a configuration of points coexisting inter-dimensionally, a line stretched so thin as to create an emptiness.

Installed across the gallery’s two spaces, Stefanie Heinze’s exhibition RULER organizes itself around rulership in both its meanings; dominion and measurement. Looking at the ruler through the psyche, Heinze’s paintings articulate a tension between release and constraint, resistance and exhaustion, domination and desire. In Lauren Berlant’s essay ‘Risky Bigness’, she writes about the need to periodically evacuate from one’s own will, ‘both the body and ‘a life’ are not only projects, but also sites of episodic intermission from personality, ways of inhabiting agency differently in small vacations from the will itself, which is so often spent from the pressures of coordinating one’s pacing with the pace of the working day, ‘(34-35). Heinze’s paintings take up this space of evacuation, allowing agency to shapeshift, revealing forms at once specific and difficult to define.

In the center of a murky neon and iridescent backdrop squats a creature with a giant pair of legs. The right leg wears what looks like a stiletto with a bubble on the toe. It rests its contoured calf against a grey concrete form, radiating solidity. The other leg, elongated and frail, with a listless hand instead of a foot caresses a purple globe. Heinze allows these formal polarities – transparency and opacity, aggression and feebleness, solidity and gaseousness – to coexist without resolution. The figure maintains itself at once as a unified being and as an assemblage of disparate parts, the individual and the collective, the powerful and the powerless.

In this delicate uncanny balance, the paintings become propositions, prompts to take a break from playing with possibility and allow the edges of the familiar to split and expand. Let space, form and self to show off their plasticity. Keep moving forward in gratified recline.