ART CITIES:Tokyo-Thilo Heinzmann

Thilo Heinzmann works primarily in the field of painting, taking its classic concern, the production of expressive pictures, and making it his own. He makes use of a series of techniques he developed himself and materials such as unbound pigment, absorbent cotton, Styrofoam, fur, or porcelain, which expand the scope of painterly techniques.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Perrotin Gallery Archive

Thilo Heinzmann’s genuine contribution to contemporary art is that he has used these media to achieve painterly qualities such as composition, color, and texture within the continuity of the history of the medium while at the same time opening new doors. In Thilo Heinzmann’s solo exhibition “my time your time our time time” are on view paintings that combine the compositional elements from various series from his past practices – pigment paintings, Tacmo, Aicmo, and polystyrene paintings with glass – in a new way for the first time. The chromatic intensity of loose pigments, the reflections of broad brushstrokes, the traces of speedily inscribed hand movements, and the luminosity of sprinkled colored glass vibrate in overlapping layers to form a polyfocal visual space. A significant voice in a generation of German painters scrutinizing the medium and its history, Heinzmann is known for his inventive, precise work that is driven by an inquiry into what painting can be today. Using a diversity of materials – from chipboard, Styrofoam, porcelain, aluminum, to nail  polish, resin, pigment, fur, cotton wool, and hessian – the artist has for the last twenty-five years worked on developing new paths and a unique visual language in his practice. The works in the main room of the gallery are characterized by his consistent and subtle approach to light, tempo, composition and color. Although each painting exists in its own right, the rhythmic sequence of their presentation facilitates the idea of a garden, a landscape, in which a figure appears and disappears. Its imagined presence activates the pictorial space, which thus becomes a stage. Heinzmann’s art typically plays with the viewer’s desire in a game of allusion and the intensity of visual experience. The two series shown in Tokyo are exemplary: the refined beauty of expression and the exposition of delicate nuances in the exhibition’s central group of work is contrasted by the direct physical vigor of the paintings in the adjoining space. The artist’s work encompasses both the elemental and the highly cultivated, which self-evidently complement each other as urban and rural, cultural and natural. Complex in their dynamics, engaging in their gestural precision, these paintings are one thing above all: seductively free. Nothing is concealed in vagueness, yet the clarity seems magical.

Photo: Thilo Heinzmann, O.T.(detail), 2020,  Oil, pigment and glass on canvas, plexiglass cover  164 x 154 x 9 cm, Photo: Roman März, © Thilo Heinzmann, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Info: Perrotin Gallery, Piramide Building, 1F, 6-6-9 Roppongi Minato-Ku, Tokyo, Duration: 9/2-20/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com