Charline Von Heyl Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1960 -

Charline von Heyl (born 1960) is a German artist[1] best known for her abstract painting. She also works with drawing, printmaking, and collage. She lives and works in New York and Marfa, Texas, together with her husband and fellow painter Christopher Wool.[2]

Von Heyl was born to a German lawyer and French-born psychologist in Mainz.[3] She grew up in Bonn and later studied with Jörg Immendorff at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and with Fritz Schwegler at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Immendorff later asked her to work for him as his assistant in Düsseldorf.[3] She moved to New York in late 1995.[4]

Von Heyl is often seen as part of one of several leading female contemporary painters, a group which also includes Cecily Brown, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Jutta Koether, Amy Sillman and Emily Sundblad.[3]

Using a wide range of imagery, from found photographs and drawings of comic books, von Heyl alternates between collage-based works on paper and painting on canvas. To make her collages, she rips images into shapes, drops them onto pages she has photocopied, spray-painted, and marked with ink, and then manipulates them by hand.[3] Von Heyl does not make studies for her paintings, and does not begin with a pre-conceived idea, allowing the works to be determined rather by the decisions that arise in the process of their making.[5]

In fall 2008 her artist’s book Sabotage was published by Xn Editions and Christophe Daviet-Thery in Paris. The book was previewed, with an introductory note by the artist, in the October 2008 Artforum.[6]

Von Heyl maintains an expansive studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York.[3] Both Wool and von Heyl had residencies in Marfa in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and today they share a studio building there.