Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You’re there, with your thick-rimmed glasses and monochrome outfits, looking at Stefanie Heinze’s canvases as if you understand everything. But let me tell you one thing: you understand nothing. And that’s precisely where the whole beauty of her work lies. That incomprehension, that perplexity you feel facing her paintings, is exactly what she is seeking.
The paintings overflowing with acidic colors and ambiguous shapes by this Berlin artist immerse us in a world where materiality touches the strange, where abstraction flirts with figuration without ever truly submitting. She turns the canvas into a battlefield where mutant organic forms and colors scream their presence confront each other.
When I look at her canvases, I feel like I’m inside Alice’s head after she ate all the mushrooms in Wonderland. Organs turn into household objects, genitals become animated creatures, and the colors assault us with an almost unbearable intensity. No wonder collectors fight over her works! At a Christie’s sale in December 2023, her painting “Third Date” sold for $1,000, tripling its high estimate. A week later at Sotheby’s, “Vim” far exceeded its estimate, reaching $1,000. And frankly, I understand them. In a market saturated with interchangeable works, Heinze offers something authentically unsettling.
What I love about Heinze’s work is the way she manipulates the creative process like an alchemist of chaos. She starts with meticulous drawings, often made in small notebooks she carries everywhere, which she then transfers onto the canvas. But beware, it’s not a simple enlargement! It’s a translation, with all the accidents and transformations that entails. She says herself: “I have no idea what it will look like. I discover it while doing it and just trust the painting.” This intuitive approach, this trust in the process itself, is light years away from the cold conceptual art that too often dominates our galleries.
Franz Kafka, in his Metamorphosis, showed us how a man could wake up transformed into a monstrous insect [1]. This radical transformation process, where a stable identity is suddenly questioned, finds a powerful visual echo in Heinze’s canvases. She shows us how a kitchen glove can transform into a teary creature, how a banana can become a melancholic phallus, or how disembodied organs can form a mesmerizing visual symphony. Like Gregor Samsa waking up as an insect, familiar objects in Heinze’s paintings undergo a disturbing metamorphosis, becoming both recognizable and profoundly strange.
The reference to Kafka is not accidental. Like the Prague writer, Heinze excels in the art of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. In “Odd Glove (Forgetting, Losing, Looping)” (2019), she transforms a simple kitchen glove into a creature with closed eyes from which tears flow, which are also, if you look closely, male genitalia. This transformation of domestic objects into emotional entities is reminiscent of the way Kafka transformed mundane situations into absurd bureaucratic nightmares.
In Kafka, ordinary objects can suddenly become threatening or incomprehensible, as in his short story “The Cares of a Family Man,” where a simple object, Odradek, becomes an enigmatic creature that defies all categorization. Similarly, the shapes in Heinze’s paintings resist any attempt at stable classification. They exist in a state of perpetual flux, simultaneously evoking several things without ever settling on a single identity.
“Vim” (2019) plunges us into a universe where forms seem in constant mutation, as if they refuse to settle into a stable identity. This instability, this formal fluidity, recalls Kafkaesque vision of a world where identity is always precarious, always threatened with dissolution. Kafka’s characters are often caught in situations where their social and personal identity is questioned; think of Joseph K. in “The Trial,” accused of a crime he did not commit and whose nature he does not even know. Similarly, the forms in Heinze’s paintings seem caught in a permanent trial of identification and disidentification, never completely themselves, always becoming something else.
But let us not stop at Kafka. Heinze’s work also engages in dialogue with the theater of the absurd, notably with the plays of Samuel Beckett. Like the Irish author, she creates universes where traditional meaning is suspended, where bodies are fragmented, where waiting and uncertainty reign supreme [2]. In “Food for the Young (Oozing Out)” (2017), her cartoonish forms floating in an undefined space evoke the atmosphere of “Waiting for Godot,” where the characters exist in a spatial and temporal limbo, awaiting a resolution that will never come.
The way Beckett deconstructs language, making it both comic and disturbing, finds a visual echo in Heinze’s compositions. Her often lyrical titles, “High Potency Brood,” “A Hollow Place in a Solid Body,” “Frail Juice,” function as poetic counterpoints to the apparent anarchy of her images. As in Beckett’s “Endgame,” where absurd dialogues mask a profound meditation on the human condition, Heinze’s seemingly chaotic compositions hide a subtle reflection on power relations and social norms.
Beckett’s characters are often reduced to dysfunctional bodies confined in restricted spaces; think of Winnie buried up to her waist, then up to her neck in “Happy Days,” or the characters in urns in “Comedy.” This reduction of the body to a presence that is both comic and pathetic finds a parallel in the way Heinze fragments and reconfigures bodily forms in her paintings. Organs are isolated from their usual context, limbs twist into impossible configurations, creating a sense of bodily alienation that is deeply Beckettian.
There is in Beckett a constant tension between the comic and the tragic, the banal and the profound. This same tension animates Heinze’s paintings. Her biomorphic forms evoke both intimate organs and everyday objects, creating a dialogue between the body and the material world around us. In “Der Professor” (2020), she juxtaposes elements that evoke sometimes academic authority, sometimes bodily fragility, in a composition reminiscent of Beckett’s theatre of the absurd where bodies are often reduced to their most basic function.
Beckett’s dark humor, “Nothing is funnier than misery,” as Nell says in “Endgame,” finds its visual equivalent in Heinze’s approach. She takes potentially heavy subjects, the body, gender, power, and treats them with a lightness that does not diminish their gravity but makes it more accessible, more immediate. This blend of seriousness and playfulness creates a productive tension that pushes the viewer to actively engage with the work rather than consume it passively.
But do not be mistaken: despite these literary references, Heinze’s art is deeply rooted in the materiality of painting. She does not illustrate concepts; she creates visual experiences that challenge our perception. As she says herself: “I do not work after other artists. I like to look at paintings and I like many painters, but I do not work after them.” This fierce independence is part of her charm. She is not here to fit neatly into a preexisting artistic lineage, but to create her own visual language, her own pictorial grammar.
What I also like about her paintings is this palpable tension between control and surrender. Heinze often speaks about the difficulty of approaching a blank canvas, the anxiety that precedes change. She evokes “the choice between ability and inability” that control represents. This struggle to find a balance between technical mastery and surrender to intuition recalls how Beckett sought to “find a form that accommodates disorder,” to use his own words. In his notebooks, Beckett wrote: “I started writing in French because in French it is easier to write without style.” Likewise, Heinze seeks an approach to painting that escapes established stylistic conventions, privileging direct experience over technical virtuosity.
In “Breeze Blocks” (2024), one of her recent works exhibited at the Petzel gallery in New York, Heinze pushes this exploration of the boundaries between order and chaos even further. The forms seem both rigid like building blocks and fluid like moving liquids, creating a visual tension that evokes how Beckett used repetition and variation to create a destabilizing musicality in his texts. This work, with its precarious balance between structure and dissolution, perfectly embodies Beckettian aesthetics of controlled failure, of what he called “try again, fail again, fail better.”
Humor is also omnipresent in Heinze’s work. A biting, offbeat humor that recalls Beckett’s. When she transforms parts of the body into animated creatures or domestic objects into emotional entities, she plays with our expectations, creating visual situations both comical and unsettling. This approach recalls the absurd situations in Beckett’s plays, where laughter often arises from deep existential discomfort. Like Beckett, who used laughter as a form of resistance to the absurdity of the human condition, Heinze uses humor as a strategy to confront the absurdity of social norms and cultural expectations.
Heinze also shares with Kafka and Beckett a mistrust of established power systems. Her paintings, with their shapes that refuse to conform to stable categories, can be read as a critique of rigid social norms. In “a 2 sie” (2019), whose title refers to her childlike understanding of a pop song with the lyrics “A to Z,” she proposes a “new alphabet, perhaps starting over for women.” This desire to create a new visual language, freed from patriarchal constraints, resonates with the way Kafka and Beckett both sought to subvert dominant linguistic structures.
Like Kafka who wrote in deliberately simplified German, creating a style that resisted the literary conventions of his time, Heinze develops a visual vocabulary that escapes traditional artistic categories. And like Beckett who abandoned English for French to free himself from the weight of the Anglophone literary tradition, Heinze seeks to free herself from the expectations related to traditional figurative or abstract painting.
Heinze describes painting as a form of engagement with “emptiness, fear, uncertainty.” As with Beckett, failure is not an obstacle to avoid but an integral part of the creative process, a potential source of discovery and innovation. She embraces the “translation errors” that occur when she transfers her drawings onto the canvas, seeing in these accidents not failures but opportunities to discover new formal possibilities.
While the world of contemporary art often sinks into pedantic intellectualism or sterile minimalism, Heinze dares to be excessive, sensual, emotional. Her paintings do not keep you at a distance with a cold concept; they invite you to dive into a bath of colors and shapes where meaning emerges from sensory experience rather than preconceived theory. They demand a visceral response, not intellectual decoding.
This engagement with the body, with materiality, is particularly refreshing at a time when so much contemporary art seems to exist mainly to be photographed and shared on Instagram. Heinze’s paintings resist digital reproduction; their color nuances, texture, and scale must be experienced in person to be fully appreciated. They remind us that art, at its best, is a physical encounter, not a virtual consumption.
Her exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, which has just ended, titled “Your Mouth Comes Second,” deepens her exploration of tenderness, vulnerability, and the integration of ancient and urban spiritualism. The title itself suggests an inversion of usual priorities, placing what comes before language, observation, sensitivity, appropriation, awkwardness, uncertainty, in the foreground. This prioritization of pre-linguistic experience recalls Beckett’s interest in what remains when language fails, in those moments when words are no longer enough and only the body, with its gestures and silences, can communicate.
In an art scene often dominated by cynicism and calculation, Stefanie Heinze offers us a breath of fresh air, strange, colorful, perhaps uncomfortable, but undeniably alive. She does not seek to impress us with obscure theories or pompous references. She rather invites us to get lost in her disorienting visual worlds, to find our own meanings within them, to embrace uncertainty as a form of liberation.
And if you don’t like it, well, that’s your problem, not hers. Heinze’s art is not meant to be understood; it is meant to be experienced. Like the works of Kafka and Beckett, it confronts us with the fundamental strangeness of existence, the insufficiency of conventional language to express our experience of the world, and the necessity to create new forms of expression.
So the next time you find yourself facing one of her paintings, stop trying to “understand” it. Allow yourself to be unsettled, confused, amused. It is in this very imbalance that the power of her work lies. For as Beckett said, “to be an artist is to fail as no one else dares to fail.” And Heinze, in her glorious and exuberant failures, shows us what success can look like.
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, translated by Alexandre Vialatte, Gallimard, Paris, 1955.
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1952.
