These days it is hard to distinguish reality from fiction as endless streams of manipulated images distort and deceive with an unholy alliance of fabricated form and false meaning. Kati Heck’s paintings, sculptures, and installations disrupt this frisson of the familiar and the faux with a contrary counter-narrative that works against the grain to resist, unsettle, and trouble our understanding of modern experience.
The installation loosely resembles the central and side panels of a polyptych altarpiece or perhaps the backdrop and scrims of a stage. Artifice, deception, and hybridity rule as all around shape-shifting figures, modeled by family and friends of the artist, enact inscrutable scenarios alongside human/animal amalgams, while nearby a sculpted “manhole” lets off steam!
In this performative theatrical space, fluid brushwork and a meticulous realist technique seduce with an appealing subterfuge that artfully disguises Heck’s interrogation of the ways cultural values circulate and intertwine with belief. On one wall, three Monsters named Juno, self, and kid, schuppig recall Hieronymus Bosch’s hybrid fusion of animal and human form. With their imaginative mix of cross-breeding and transgressive deviation these playful yet strange so-called monsters could stand in for outsiders, whether they are refugees, illegal aliens, or simply those whose non-conforming bodies resist dominant power.
Like the paintings of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) artists Otto Dix and Christian Schad, Kraft I (Walter kommt) and Kraft II combine realistic description with anomalous and incongruous elements to underscore the critical, satirical, and confrontational potential of difference. Standing in skewed perspective against a medieval gate or seated in front of a backdrop of swirling clouds, with each slightly larger-than-life body rendered with a sensuous and tactile materiality, these portraits of a well-known Antwerp fashion designer and a German singer nevertheless seem out of place. Missing limbs and multiple signing hands enact disability, question convention, and otherwise give visibility to enigmatic noncompliance.
Heck’s fluid painterly fictions also bring to mind the magic realism and invented fantasies of Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, and Leonora Carrington. Like these women surrealists, Heck’s work is informed by a strong female vision and feminist narrative. Often discovered in a painting’s details, this discourse unravels in Vom Unten as snail eggs, beads, and a lamb’s head circulating around a seated woman evoke the sacred, social, and symbolic ways that the personal is political.
As the other works in this exhibition, Classic V pursues a subversive strategy. Reprising traditional historical depictions of the death of a hero, Heck’s large painting of figures gathered around a bed might seem at first to represent an intimate, even poignant scene of sorrow and commemoration. Yet despite the brooding poses and the woman’s offer of a nurturing breast, the man in the bed at the center of the composition is no hero, but rather a disembodied, shrouded lump. His bloated head, a mutant mass of disease and decay, serves as a comment perhaps on today’s belligerent and degenerative rhetoric, and the loss of decency and the heroic in our current state of affairs.
Susan Canning
Independant Scholar and Critic
New York, New York
