Kylie Heidenheimer at Galerie Gris
by Amy Griffin, Albany Times Union, July 3, 2013
Hudson
Kylie Heidenheimer, whose solo show at Galerie Gris in Hudson opened in June and runs through July 15, is a painter's painter
Which is not to say that she makes paintings solely for other painters to the exclusion of the uninitiated. She is a painter who works in a specialized vernacular, but you don't have to speak the language to appreciate the message. In a show that includes 18 works — paintings on canvas or wood panel and some works on paper — she demonstrates her keen interest in finding dichotomies and the push and pull of space she creates on the canvas, showing evidence of the artist's hand versus withholding it.
Aggressive marks bump up against washes of color. Some brushstrokes almost hover on the surface creating a kind of curtain over layers of more color. Gallery owner Steve Isoz describes the effect she achieves as a kind of shimmer.
Indeed, in "Flame" (2011), bold horizontal and vertical marks in brown and purple recede, some begin to drip and others blur into colors below, giving the quality of a road on a hot day — that wavy quality caused by refraction that shimmers above the surface. The play between the build-up of paint, the washes, drips and strokes, give the painting a depth that sinks in as you look at it.
Heidenheimer, who splits her time between New York City and Hudson, says she's interested in "touching air," something that accounts for the ethereal quality of much of her work. Much of her process is about challenging herself to move out of her comfort zone. For "Flame," she chose purples and browns purposely because she gravitates toward blues. For a series of works on paper, she applied blobs of paint through screens to remove the physical mark-making she often utilizes. On one wall, three large canvases from 2009 show the artist experimenting with gray scale, as drips of black and smears of white suggest scenes obscured by rain on a window.
Isoz opened Galerie Gris on the north end of Warren Street just last year. With a background in advertising and marketing, his foray into running an art gallery grew out of a simple love of art.
An avid collector, he began showing work mostly by artists he'd collected.
Heidenheimer is the first artist he's shown whose work wasn't already familiar to him. It's a direction the gallery is continuing in as Isoz expands his roster.
He plans on mounting only solo exhibitions of artists he finds interesting and giving them six weeks, rather than the typical four. With a schedule common to Hudson galleries, the space is open Thursday through Monday, so the extra two weeks gives the work greater exposure.
Heidenheimer shows regularly in Brooklyn and Manhattan and has been featured in solo exhibitions at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel and Columbia University, both in New York, and at Ohio Northern University.
The show at Galerie Gris is a sort of survey of her work, as Isoz chose a range of pieces, some from as far back as 15 years. The result is an engaging exhibit that exemplifies Heidenheimer's trajectory as an artist — a portrait, in a sense, of an artist not content to dwell in a single, comfortable mode of working.
Amy Griffin is a freelance writer in Delmar.