Heike-Karin Föll

Critical text

Heike-Karin Föll (b. 1967, Bad Cannstatt) works on the materiality and mechanisms of drawing, painting, and writing. Her work interacts with everyday media reality and styles, and analogue and digital texts and displays. Drawing, and also its smallest unit, the line, are prominent in this context. From here, different artistic formats unfold: a page of a book, a sheet of paper, a canvas, all becoming seemingly translucent towards digital screens. The individual works are embedded in a structure of correlation that blurs their respective boundaries. In the multiple-part series ‘my brain’ (2014–), the conceptual gesture of selection and constellation is central to its drawings and notations, as is their emphasis and objectification in the form of a grid. The drawings are related to research matters, and thus to something exterior that can be named and accessed. Their delicate line, taken from the realm of art and introducing an early historical reference to the visual media of the magazine and the book page, also indicates minor genres such as fashion drawing. The style of 1980s fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez is a reference point for these works, along with visual materials taken from the first internet live stream of a fashion show, Alexander McQueen’s collection ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, with its scaly ‘armadillo’ shoes, and iPad gestures of scrolls and swipes.

Text by Bettina Steinbrügge