Probieren geht über studieren

It comes as no surprise: his family ties to educational professions, Heyn's own work as an art teacher for children, the constant learning that comes from engaging with young perspectives. All of this is reflected in Heyn's artistic practice. For Heyn, the childlike perspective is not a creative motif, but an epistemological starting point.

As an autodidact, he eschews academic routines.

His painting is unbound, curious, often playful. The colours are loud, the style direct, the motifs charged with an immediacy that may at first seem naive. Apples, chairs, faces, still lifes; classically charged images appear, but not with the intention of quoting, rather as forms of possibility. What counts is the in-between, the interplay of form and colour, the field of friction that arises through superimposition, disruption or condensation.


In the art-historical context, Heyn's attitude joins a long line of positions that understand the immediate, the seemingly childlike or uneducated as a critical strategy. Henri Rousseau was already seen as a boundary figure in early modernism, someone who established a new visual language beyond academic conventions. In this context, it's also worth checking out the artist Rose Wylie, whose deliberately clumsy visual language can be read as a radical statement against conventional painting discourses. The often calculated naivety in the works can also always be read as an opposition to patriarchal symbol systems. It reveals an attitude that is not anti-intellectual, but anti-hierarchical, and thus structurally related to Heyn's approach.

In Heyn's work, this impulse is neither theorised nor didactically formulated. It is palpable in the gesture, in the approach, in the attitude towards the material. He is not interested in technical perfection. He chooses the detour, the refraction, the uneven. The humour inherent in many of his works is never mere illustration, but a means of creating distance. The lightness remains unsettling because it always touches on the uncanny. The cheerful faces my niece talks about leave viewers free to interpret them as they wish. One thinks of dolls, of masks, of something that is exposed to the gaze but does not return it.

• „Probieren geht über studieren“
  
• Björn Heyn
  
• 04.07 - 02.08.2025
  
• Opening reception: 04.07, 6:00-9:00 p.m.