THILO HEINZMANN

B. 1969.

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Professor at UdK Berlin.

Heinzmann works primarily in the field of painting, taking its classic concern, the production of expressive pictures, and making it his own. He makes use of a series of techniques he developed himself and materials such as unbound pigment, absorbent cotton, styrofoam, fur, or porcelain, which expand the scope of painterly techniques. Heinzmann’s genuine contribution to contemporary art is that he has used these media to achieve painterly qualities such as composition, color, and texture within the continuity of the history of the medium while at the same time opening new doors.

Thilo Heinzmann, born in Berlin in 1969, attended Städelschule in Frankfurt from the early 1990s in the class of Thomas Bayrle. During that time he also assisted Martin Kippenberger. A significant voice in a generation of German painters scrutinizing the medium and its history, his inventive, precise works are driven by an inquiry into what painting can be today. Using chipboard, styrofoam, nail polish, resin, pigment, fur, cotton wool, porcelain, aluminum and hessian, Heinzmann has for the last twenty-five years worked on developing new paths and an unique visual language in his practice. He is interested in the presence that each work creates, which is further enhanced by his paintings’ powerful tactile qualities. It invites the viewer to notions on some essentials: composition, surface, form, color, light, texture, and time. In 2018 he was appointed professor of painting at Universität der Künste in Berlin.

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