The exercise begins in the large ground-floor gallery, with a collection of paintings and drawings by German-born New York painter Charline von Heyl, who participated in a 2006 ICA show of work by artists from Cologne.
Von Heyl, who has lived in New York for 15 years, is an abstract painter. Her 18 large canvases - some in acrylic, some in oil, and some combining both - clearly identify her, with one exception that I can recall, as an abstractionist who avoids manipulations of identifiable reality.
If we discount the frequent use of motifs such as grids, diamonds, stripes, and similar common patterns, her "subjects" coalesce out of her imagination as she works. With each work, she seeks to create, in her words, a "new image that stands for itself as a fact."
The gallery notes and the exhibition catalog, which includes an interview with the artist, make this process sound like a Eureka! moment.
Yet von Heyl's practice goes back to the origins of abstraction itself, to Kandinsky. It came to public attention in this country with "action painting." It has been philosophized to death.
This leaves us with the paintings themselves, and with three multi-panel arrays of mixed-media, black-and-white drawings. These, fortunately, are sufficient to provide a satisfying experience, because von Heyl is an accomplished painter capable of producing a variety of expression from minimal means.
The paintings cover the last decade, but they do not describe a smooth, logical arc of progression. Von Heyl combines a number of familiar tactics such as dripping, color-field washiness, spatial ambiguity, hard-edged shapes with intense but unpredictable color. She can alternate between vibrant yellow and earthy brown effortlessly, as the mood strikes her.
