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With her penchant for stylistic shifts and lexicon of visual moves, the German-born painter Charline von Heyl has been called one of the most influential artists working today. One of 17 artists represented in The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World that just opened at MOMA, von Heyl is definitely having a moment. A suite of etchings on view at Crown Point Press is an opportune time to consider her graphic work.
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figurative forms. The work evokes Picasso’s muscularity, as eyeballs, thick hands, and bent arms grapple for purchase and stability. In Nightpack (Red, Yellow and Blue) this consists of a central mass of red ink bursting from a frame of blue over a pitted washy ground of pale yellow, with red gestural flaps suggesting cockscombs and bird beaks, qualities that give the work a barnyard, hard scrapple urgency. von Heyl speaks of “our slapstick eternal now.” And in Nightpack (The Lost Weekend) she inks a cartoony bottle into a four-fingered hand, bringing to mind scuffling scenarios of drunken benders.