Thierry-Goldberg Projects is pleased to present Pure Love, the first US exhibition of new paintings by the Leipzig-based artist, Katrin Heichel. With her latest paintings, Heichel focuses on often overlooked details of urban/industrial settings and construction sites. These solitary views—either at abandon or rest—convey a sense of the life that once filled them through examination of things left behind. By bringing attention to these “leftovers,” as Heichel calls them, she gives significance to seemingly haphazard and forgotten objects that, upon reflection, become emblems of hard-won labor and living.

Jagged tops of gnarled chain-link fences and detritus of street gutters and construction sites fill and seem to expand from the very edges of Heichel’s canvases. She is direct and unforgiving in her technique and depiction. Heichel builds each view from memories and parts of environments she has found, explored, and passed through. By arranging elements common to these environments, she creates anonymous composites of spaces where life is suspended. In this way, Heichel does not speak to one specific space, but aspects of oblivion in all spaces.

Heichel offers peripheral and unflattering views in an attempt to raise questions of life both inside and outside her painted scenes. As her works offer no sentiment and no answers, one may only make conjectures of them. Through the power of presumption, the objects and spaces instigate a meditation on behalf of the questioning viewer. As a result, the icon-like paintings’ underlying spirituality and beauty transcend their depicted grit and dereliction. What lies beyond—possibly “Pure Love,” as a sign reads hanging from a pipe in one of her paintings—is up to the viewer to decide.

Katrin Heichel (b. 1972) lives and works in Leipzig. She studied with Arno Rink and Neo Rauch at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and received undergraduate and post graduate degrees in fine art. She has had solo exhibitions at Gallery b2, Leipzig; Gallery Frank Schlag & Cie., Essen; and at Schau-Fenster, Berlin, in collaboration with Laden Fuer Nichts, Leipzig. Her work was included in group exhibitions at Black Door, Istanbul, Turkey; Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, Austria; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Xawery Dunikowski Museum at Krolikarnia-Palais; National Museum Warschau, Warsaw, Poland; Museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf, Switzerland; and Museum der Moderne Salzburg Mönchsberg, Salzburg, Austria. Heichel’s work is included in collections such as Cabinet des Estampes, Geneva, Swizterland; The Museum der Bildenden Kuenste, Leipzig; and the Olbricht Collection, Germany. She is the recipient of a Free State of Saxony postgraduate study grant, 2007 and is currently an artist in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn.