NEW YORK, NY.- Bernarducci Meisel Gallery is presenting a solo exhibition for Gus Heinze entitled Painting at Age 90. A direct reference to the artist’s recent jubilee the exhibition includes over a dozen paintings spanning the career of the accomplished artist. Heinze frames his paintings of city streets, train engines, and carburetors in way that accentuates its natural environment but somewhat abstractly.
One recent painting, Truck by Oldsmobile (2013), is of a vintage Oldsmobile truck from the turn of the 20th Century. The shape of the vehicle, small bulbs in the headlights, a cabinet-like door at hood of the car, and wood carriage are characteristics of these contemporaneously groundbreaking vehicles. Heinze crops the view of the truck in way reminiscent of a snapshot. The gradient purple background alludes to the artist’s mastering of light.
By nature Gus Heinze is a pragmatist but his earnestness comes through in his paintings. The paintings of train engines give an overall sense of power and potential momentum. Yet the view appears serene by virtue of his use of color and contrast, as in Orange Magnito (2001). His calm, orderly approach doesn’t crowd his scenes with objects or forms. Nonetheless there is always much to see and absorb in Heinze’s paintings. He has focused so intently on the details and machinery that upon first glance, the viewer is left wondering what exactly is depicted. Dexterously controlling the hues of blues, greens, and grays, Heinze uses subdued colors in a very bold way.
57th Street and Madison (2005) depicts a busy intersection in New York City. The square composition is framed with city traffic in the foreground and the IBM building hovering over another building office building in on the background of the painting. The center is an architectural dance of office windows and reflections.
Gus Heinze is considered to be a ‘soft focus’ Photorealist. His edges are blurred almost uniformly although when seen in smaller reproduction, appear quite sharp. He is not bravura with his brushwork— he is orderly, discrete, controlled, and consciously ‘tasteful’. The simplicity of a Heinze painting is exactly what makes them so intriguing and captivating. He is able to make the sensual appear serene.
Heinze was born in Bremen, Germany and lives in Tiburon, California. His paintings are featured in the traveling museum exhibition entitled 50 Years of Hyperrealism that opened in Tübingen, Germany and was on view at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao, the Birmingham Museum of Art in England, and many other notable institutions. It will be on view at the Musée d’Ixelles in Brussels (29 June – 25 September).
