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Charline von Heyl -  - Viewing Room - Petzel Gallery

Installation view of Charline von Heyl's Snake Eyes at the Hirshhorn in 2018. Image taken from the NYTimes.

Cunning, witty, dandyish at times, proudly kitsch at others, Ms. von Heyl’s paintings scamper over any distinction between “pure” abstract and figurative painting. They make use of graphical motifs such as stripes, grids, zigzags and squiggles, and luxuriate in a palette of warm colors: a muffled lavender, a lemon-chiffon yellow and a cherry-blossom pink that all, at times, get mucked up with gray.

Charline von Heyl -  - Viewing Room - Petzel Gallery

Charline von Heyl (b. 1960, Germany) has lived in the United States since 1996. She studied painting in Hamburg and Düsseldorf and participated in the Cologne-based art scene in the 1980s. She currently divides her time between New York, NY and Marfa, TX.

Von Heyl's first museum survey was at Le Consortium, Dijon in 2009. Her first U.S. museum show was at the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005 and her first survey in the United States was at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia in 2011. 

Her work has been exhibited both in the United States and abroad, including solo museum exhibitions at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom; the Kunsthalle Nurnberg, Nurnberg, Germany; the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; and the Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria.

Group exhibitions include Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne, which was organized at ICA and then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

Von Heyl's works are in the collections of the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Tate, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.