ALMUT HEISE

It is less well known that since the mid-1960s, parallel to her painterly output, Almut Heise has created a concentrated graphic œuvre that expands the conventional concept of drawing. Classical aspects of fine art drawing such as linear definition or the impasto application of colour, which have seemed contradictory or even mutually exclusive since the Italian Renaissance, no longer interest her. Heise’s coloured pencil drawings appear to have been built up with the drawing medium over the picture plane. The traditional notion of a characteristic line is also less significant in her work; instead, her compositions seem to be modelled from the surface without any graphic gesture. In this way, conventional line drawing is constrasted with a new concept of drawing.

Heise’s concise graphic œuvre – a body of works that has grown continuously over the past decades and has remained focussed throughout on interiors and portraits – conveys the precision of her graphic thinking. Whereas in the early stages of her career, the drawings were produced as preparatory studies for her paintings, over time they increasingly became autonomous master drawings.

Looking back over Heise’s output to date, it is impressive to note the subtle changes in expression in her portraits over the course of time. In the faces of her models, Heise sensitively captures emerging eras and changing moods, reflecting these in portrait drawings that nevertheless seem to exist outside space and time. These keen powers of observation are what lend her graphic œuvre its contemporary relevance. Heise thus joins a long tradition of graphic introspection around the human face and, without borrowing stylistic elements or devices, forms her own view of people and how to portray them.

Heise’s highly distinctive œuvre is characterised by a light-handed crossover of classical subjects from art history and motifs from everyday culture which permeate her pictorial worlds and portraits and, countering their stillness, radiate a certain restlessness that disconcerts the viewer.