Charline von Heyl is jamming things together

Using a wide range of imagery, from found photographs and drawings to 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’s photocopied, spray-painted, and marked with ink, and then manipulates them by hand until they offer up something new to her. Only when her head is teeming with abstract forms does she begin to paint. “The works on paper are a filling station, and when she’s painting, she’s emptying,” explains the curator Jenelle Porter, who organized von Heyl’s ICA survey. “That muddle in her head comes onto the canvas in this way that looks nothing like the works on paper. She jams things together that shouldn’t go together, but somehow her brain can put them together in a way that our eye accepts them.”

Charline von Heyl Moky, 2013, Oil and acrylic on canvas 82 x 76 inches

Charline von Heyl Night Doctor, 2013, Oil and acrylic on canvas 82.5 x 68 inches