THILO HEINZMANN: UPFRONT, WILD AND UNCHAINED

Perrotin Seoul is pleased to present a solo exhibition by German painter Thilo Heinzmann, untitled “upfront, wild and unchained”.

October 31 – December 21, 2024

Thilo Heinzmann’s signature ‘pigment paintings’ – abstract compositions of divergent and overlapping tangential calligraphic marks augmented with bursts of pure pigment exploding across the surface – are all both unique and part of a greater ongoing conversation. When the artist himself speaks, his observations and ideas tumble over each other in quick succession, just like his ebullient and enticing work. Heinzmann is a passionate cultural enthusiast with eclectic interests, including serious music and odd pockets of art history.

“upfront, wild and unchained” (2024), his latest and second major solo exhibition in Seoul, comprises around ten recent untitled abstract pigment paintings. One pair (both O.T., 2023) are both three-meter-wide panoramic compositions which feature a palette moving from mauve to pinks, and blues to moments of emerald. In these visually dramatic paintings, lines and forms traverse or progress, even dance, rhythmically across the pictorial plane with abandon.

Heinzmann’s pigment paintings emerge from a process which, on one hand, he predetermines and calibrates, but which also sets free energy and chance encounters beyond his control. The emergence of each composition on a wet surface thus becomes revelatory, harnessing the power of the ‘deliberate accident’ and intuition based on honed experience turned to decisive action. The results are, indeed, upfront, wild and unchained, as too are the effects on our imaginations.

It is the artist’s generous curiosity which enlivens and propels the interconnectedness, the vectors, tangents and sense of space-time travel in his haptic work. His thought-life and art-making are all part of a continuous, open-ended flow. A flow of consciousness that leaves seductive marks and traces.