“My paintings usually hide their traces and their own history […] They have weird shifts where you don’t expect them, and at their best they will have an auratic presence despite themselves. It’s not about mystifying anything; it’s about lengthening the time of pleasure. Or torture.”
—Charline von Heyl

A mesmerising interplay of abstraction and figuration, Charline von Heyl’s 2009 Black Stripe Mojo is a striking example of the artist’s unparalleled ability to create images that resist easy categorisation. This dynamic painting—first exhibited at Petzel Gallery in 2010 before making its way to von Heyl’s major retrospectives at Tate Liverpool in 2012 and Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2018—embodies the artist’s signature approach: a fusion of visual dissonance and painterly innovation that keeps the viewer perpetually engaged.

 

Watch: Charline von Heyl and curator Gabin Delahunty take us around the artist’s 2012 solo exhibition at Tate Liverpool, featuring Black Stripe Mojo (2009)

 

​​The term anarchic frequently appears in von Heyl’s reflections on her formative years. Born in Mainz, Germany, in 1960, she studied under the late German painter Jörg Immendorff in Hamburg and later with Fritz Schwegler at the renowned Düsseldorf Art Academy, where contemporaries included Thomas Ruff, Katharina Fritsch and Andreas Gursky. Immersed in the dynamic painting scene of Düsseldorf and Cologne, she was profoundly influenced by the radical approaches of Immendorff, Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger. Their anarchistic methods reshaped her perception of painting—not as a purely aesthetic pursuit but as something capable of aggression and disruption. In the mid-1990s, von Heyl relocated to New York City, where she became immersed in an art scene that further propelled her exploration of abstraction and image-making.

At the heart of Black Stripe Mojo is an ambiguous, Chimera-like form suspended against a background of stark black-and-white stripes. The creature—a fusion of organic and grotesque—appears both animalistic and elusive, its fluid contours shifting between the corporeal and the illusory. This vague presence is heightened by von Heyl’s distinct handling of paint, where thoughtful modelling and total abstraction collide, creating an image oscillating between presence and absence. Von Heyl has spoken about her desire ‘to get abstraction to a point where it screams that it is something: a representation and a thing.’ⁱ Through her work, the artist looks to achieve a form of abstraction that communicates directly – something that ‘screams’ rather than remains silent or passive. Black Stripe Mojo is a boisterous and declarative work, a true testament to the artist’s painterly pursuits.

 

The composition plays with perception in a way that recalls optical illusions and Surrealist dreamscapes. The regimented stripes in the background—reminiscent of Daniel Buren’s conceptual interventions—act as both a framing device and a destabilising force, disrupting depth and flattening space. This visual tension generates a pulsating energy that heightens the viewer’s interaction with the work. As Kirsty Bell describes, von Heyl’s paintings create ‘a sense of questioning and instability that keeps the viewer alert. Their vibrancy hints at desire, but never satisfaction,’ⁱⁱ a zone where clarity and ambiguity are held in exquisite balance.

 

A comparison can also be drawn between Black Stripe Mojo and von Heyl’s later work, the 2018 Vandals Without Sandals held in the Warwick Collection. In both paintings, the artist employs bold graphic elements that interact with fluid, ambiguous forms. However, where Black Stripe Mojo leans into a stark interplay of high-contrast pattern and figuration, Vandals Without Sandals explodes with colour, using fragmented marks and gestural dynamism to create a sense of restless movement. Both works demonstrate von Heyl’s skill at using compositional dissonance to captivate and disorient the viewer.

Process
 

Von Heyl’s process is rooted in experimentation, a constant oscillation between control and unpredictability. She describes her instinctual approach to painting, where each layer reacts to the previous one, leading the artwork in unforeseen directions. Von Heyl explains, ‘I will run with the painting, like it’s a dog on a leash, chasing and almost falling behind it.’ⁱⁱⁱ She often begins with a gestural impulse, then builds upon and obliterates forms through layering, scraping, and overpainting. This method aligns with the influence of artists such as Sigmar Polke, whose play with transparency and opacity creates unstable, shifting imagery. Von Heyl’s engagement with printed matter and collage techniques also recalls the visual sensibilities of Robert Rauschenberg, particularly in how she disrupts conventional figure-ground relationships.

Von Heyl’s paintings deeply engage with the act of image-making itself, rather than representation. Kirsty Bell notes that von Heyl’s works engage in ‘spatial leaps, false starts and abrupt changes of direction,’^iv creating an instability that keeps the viewer alert. Her paintings exist as autonomous entities—non-referential and self-sustaining. This autonomy is palpable in Black Stripe Mojo, where the work functions as an image that is at once immediate and elusive. Von Heyl has described her reason for painting as ‘the desire to invent an image that has not yet been seen and cannot be named.’^v This longing to precede language underscores the artist's commitment to creating works that resist easy categorisation. This paradoxical assertion is at the core of her practice, inviting viewers into a realm where meaning is fluid and constantly shifting.
 

Black Stripe Mojo represents a prime example of von Heyl’s celebrated visual lexicon. Its inclusion in major institutional exhibitions underscores its significance within the artist’s practice and within contemporary painting at large. A compelling and enigmatic work, it captures the spirit of von Heyl’s bold artistic language—one that continues to challenge and redefine the possibilities of image-making today.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Charline von Heyl’s work has been exhibited at notable institutions worldwide, including solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2018); the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2018); Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago (2015); the Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2012); the Kunsthalle Nurnberg, Germany (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2009); and the Vienna Secession, Austria (2004).
   

• Von Heyl’s works are in the collections of the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Tate, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
   

• Born in Mainz, Germany, in 1960, von Heyl studied under the late German painter Jörg Immendorff in Hamburg and later with Fritz Schwegler at the renowned Düsseldorf Art Academy, where contemporaries included Thomas Ruff, Katharina Fritsch and Andreas Gursky.

 

 

ⁱ Charline von Heyl, quoted in John Kelsey, ‘1000 WORDS: CHARLINE VON HEYL’, Artforum, vol. 47, no. 2, October 2008.

ⁱⁱ Kristy Bell, ‘Charline von Heyl. Its Own reality’, Frieze, no. 123, 2009.

ⁱⁱⁱ Charline von Heyl quoted in ‘An interview with Charline von Heyl’, Even Magazine, no. 7, 2017.

^iv Kristy Bell, ‘Charline von Heyl. Its Own reality’, Frieze, no. 123, 2009.

^v Charline von Heyl in ‘Charline von Heyl’, press release, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, 2010