Stopping at the right moment – On Sebastian Heiner’s paintings

Davis Riedel

On one of my visits to Sebastian Heiner’s studio in the summer of 2015, I asked the artist at what point he was satisfied with a painting. When he had stopped “at the right moment”, he replied. Not prepared for a more specific response, I wondered, however, what that “right moment” meant. I came upon a more detailed answer in an interview with the artist, printed in an exhibition catalogue from 2001: “I consider a painting finished when I find inner peace; when form and colour have reached a balance, opposites have come together to form a unity and have created a composition.”

Sebastian Heiner was born in Berlin in 1964. In his family, “art was part of everyday life”. His grandfather, Wilhelm Heiner (1902–1965), was also an artist, leaving behind a legacy of glass painting, sculpture, and a large oeuvre of paintings. He was a teacher at the School of Applied Arts in Bielefeld.

Sebastian Heiner began his studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1984. At the time, painting as a medium had been declared dead by many, causing critical disputes among artists. Nevertheless, Heiner opted for Klaus Fußmann’s painting class, completing his studies as a “Meisterschüler” in 1991. Up until the early 2000s, figurative paintings dominated Heiner’s work: human-amorphous creatures appeared regularly in his paintings, drawings, and graphics. With their strikingly long arms and legs, they attempted to communicate with each other, thereby often seeming isolated from one another (ill. 1).

Gradually, these figures vanished from Heiner’s paintings, as paint progressively began to cover their bodies – as is the case in “Traumzeit”, or “Begrüßung”, a painting from 2003 (ill. 2) which bears resemblance to a fresco. Eventually, the figures became almost completely covered by paint and Heiner’s work began to oscillate more strongly between abstract and figurative painting.

In the following years, this development became more and more noticeable. In the spring of 2004, Sebastian Heiner’s path led him to China, a country shaped by growth, economic upheaval, and cultural change. He initially stayed there for seven months before beginning a period as an “artistic wanderer between the worlds”, travelling between his Berlin and Beijing studios up until 2008. Though deeply inspired by Chinese philosophy and culture, Sebastian Heiner’s overall abstract works that originated here speak of the impact the metropolis had on the artist, with its all-encompassing urban life (ill. 3). Heiner attempted to “transform the city’s strong impressions, translating them into painting”. Axel Feuss had a name for the way in which Heiner created works in Beijing: “Megacity Action Painting”. During this time, the gesturing of long arms and large hands, so striking in the artist’s early paintings, progressively transformed into gestural painting on canvas. China thus became a place for development and experimentation.

Heiner returned to China in 2010 and 2011, this time to Shanghai, where he resumed his work, primarily on abstract paintings, such as the “Wu-Shu-Series” (ill. 4–10). He continued this process during his stay in Bangkok in 2013, which lasted several months. In 2014, Heiner traveled to Israel and Jordan. All these distant places and “transcultural experiences” left their mark on the artist’s way of thinking and on his work, but did not directly affect his choice of motifs.

Since Sebastian Heiner’s stay in Bangkok, abstract painting has dominated his work, clearly visible in paintings created in the artist’s Berlin studio over the last two years. Here, in an industrial area more than 100 years old, some distance from the city centre, other artists and artisans have also set up their work places. Within this place of exchange, Heiner’s studio is a refuge where the artist creates his paintings in the midst of the space, a so-called “inner space”, clearly recognizable as a working area where the creative process takes place. On the floor, leftover paints and papers stained with colour, as well as other working materials have created a kind of carpet. Finished paintings hang on the studio’s whitewashed walls. In this way, a “rational” space is created next to the “emotional” working space, allowing for a concentrated viewing and contemplation of the paintings.

The studio’s floor says a lot about the way in which the artist works: scattered across it lie numerous boxes of buckets and bottles filled with oil paints, the painting material for the works. Heiner squeezes the paint from its tubes or grabs it from buckets with bare hands and arms that are covered in a protective lotion. He transfers the gooey mass onto the canvas by pressing or throwing it onto the surface. Then, using a spatula or a doctor blade, but above all his hands and forearms, Heiner rubs the paint into the canvas, creating traces of colour and form that speak of movement. Shiny sections oppose matt areas, smooth surfaces stand in contrast to areas where the oil paint already appears porous. Bit by bit, Heiner applies more paint to the canvas, manipulating it with a brush, the corner of a cardboard, or a fly swatter. With impulsive gestures, the paint is spread, mixed, twisted, layered, scratched, painted over or brought to the surface from the layers that lie beneath. Traces of paint that have already dried break open to reveal underlying layers.

In this way, Sebastian Heiner carves out the paint from the centre of the painting, creating a relief-like, almost sculptural layer of paint, without revealing the work’s starting or focal point. After viewing Sebastian Heiner’s paintings, it is almost impossible to imagine a white canvas.

Despite the freedom of painting that is visible on the canvas, a number of works reveal dominant forms, which convey a sense of stability. They consist primarily of wavelike curves of colour, moving across the canvas like a Chinese dragon, or islands of colour that evolve like geological formations – corals, flower blossoms and other plant-like forms. The viewer imagines seeing all these things but the painting’s abstract aspects soon take over. Through the forms and the impulsive application of colour, edges have been either calmly spread or mounted against each other, similar to rock formations. The viewers take in the paint’s rough edges as their gaze is retained, repeatedly allowing for a short rest and a new approach. They are able to retrace the artist’s work, not only by being in the studio, but through the viewing of the paintings themselves. Dark or bright monochrome backgrounds set the painting’s tone, intensifying or soothing the applied colours and their expressive power. Heiner not only considers colour as an expression of his mood, but also uses it to “provoke” himself by “applying a black layer of paint as an undercoat, for example” and then “reacting to it”. In earlier works, Sebastian Heiner would often cover the whole canvas with paint. In his new paintings, however, he consciously avoids this “all-over” approach. The monochrome backgrounds therefore deliberately create a coloured setting and enhance the intensity of the painting.

The artist’s body and its distinct dynamic are key to the power of painting. Heiner paints fast, his body and mind fully engaged in the process. Breaks are possible and necessary when the paint must dry. Considering the size of most works, painting becomes a physical effort, as “the artist’s body inscribes itself into the painting’s surface through movement.” Movement not only includes action in front of the canvas, the choreography also involves painting, stopping, stepping back and contemplating, and starting all over again. Creating his works within a performance is a possibility, but Sebastian Heiner has only painted in front of an audience on few occasions and has seldom been filmed in the process. The loud and the spectacular are not his realm.

While Sebastian Heiner employs a lot of power when he works, the act of painting is not as furious as it may sound. It is no battle of materials, even if the intense process of painting and the resulting appearance and condition of the paint – creative coincidences at best – can lead to the creation of the work. The “inner peace” mentioned at the beginning of this text, the concentration while working and the balancing of the composition are, however, essential stages in completing a painting.

Heiner’s works, especially those created in recent years, are the next logical step in his artistic trajectory and the result of an independent reflection regarding the development of abstract forms in art history, specifically the movement of Informalism or Tachism that evolved after the Second World War in Germany and in France. Heiner’s new paintings are thus rooted in the tradition of 20th century painting. That Heiner is inspired by artists such as Emil Schumacher, Jean Fautrier or Wols, who paved the way for a new informal art, is beyond question, as is his zeal for their American contemporaries, the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The style of Heiner’s paintings and the strength of their creation are reminiscent of European and North-American traditions, while also bearing resemblance to the Asian avant-garde, to works – incidentally painted with the artist’s feet – by Kazuo Shiraga, a member of the Japanese artist group Gutai that was founded in the 1950s.

However, as mentioned above, we misunderstand Heiner’s paintings if we were to solely consider Pollock’s famous quote: “When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing“. Heiner may create with gestural, often impulsive impetus, but as the work on the painting progresses, he becomes more and more conscious and cautious. Heiner’s beginnings lie in figurative painting. After shifting to abstraction, works in recent years have become newly invented variations of gestural-abstract painting, prompting “associations”. The short titles offer only a rough orientation. Named after locations, possibly places of yearning, they are chosen by the artist upon completion of the painting. However, they do not offer up an underlying, symbolic meaning. Nor do they pose existential questions or form a pathway to spiritual depths. It was not without reason that Heiner named his exhibition at the cloister of the Church of Saint Judoc in Bielefeld in 2015 “Associations”: The quiet location, together with the whitewashed walls emphasized the works’ power. At the same time, they allowed an act to occur that Sebastian Heiner aims to achieve when creating his works: looking at the paintings and engaging in the balance of form and colour while uncovering the works’ compositions, the viewer was able to find inner peace.