Stefanie Heinze

Your Mouth Comes Second

The Clandestine Way In

Stefanie Heinze’s (b. Berlin, 1987; lives and works in New York, US) artistic process refutes the easy classification of abstraction or figuration. The artist starts with small-scale drawings and collages, which are then translated to sweeping tableaus. For her, drawing is an internal act, a process of reduction, while painting is an external act, one of production. Imagery is constantly cut away and built back up, existing somewhere between negation and addition. In its constant metamorphosis and change, Heinze’s work disrupts distinctions between so-called high and low culture, from the imagery she cites to the treatment of the paint itself.

Your Mouth Comes Second is the first solo institutional exhibition which brings together a selection of recent works reflecting the artist’s central concerns: the depiction and processing of raw materials, the exploration of tenderness and vulnerability, companionship, and the integration of ancient and urban spiritualism. Inspired by these counterhegemonic sources of knowledge, the exhibition explores what comes before, with, and after language, emphasizing an empirical vocabulary and the sensory experience of painting.

Stefanie Heinze’s first monograph with the same title presents her paintings, drawings, and collages in dialogue with a rich selection of writings: poems by Fid. Fischer and Sophie Robinson, essays by Mason Leaver-Yap and Miciah Hussey, and a conversation between Mason Leaver-Yap and the artist.