Charline von heyl biography of martin

Among the dozen or so New Yorkers leading an exuberant revival in abstract painting, Charline von Heyl stands out for a fearless stylistic diversity.

The German artist moved to New York in 1994, and since then she has brought back into painting themes and motifs once left for dead: thoughtful design, seductive color, and passages of figuration unafraid of being called kitsch.

And yet von Heyl’s enigmatic art, which has never developed in a single direction but flitted among aims and approaches, does not shrink from the challenges posed to painting over the last century. It runs right into them, and insists that a future for the medium can only be built on its past.

Von Heyl was born in Mainz, Germany, in 1960.

In the 80s she moved to Hamburg, where she met Albert Oehlen and other painters of the raucous generation before hers; later, in the hothouse of early 90s Cologne, she walked a thin line between f