Snow is delighted to present Amélie von Heydebreck’s first solo exhibition TWO TIMES SPACETIME as part of the Snow series of guest exhibitions and events.

A warm welcome!

Vernissage

April 18, 6 - 8 pm

In the presence of the artist

Berlin based visual artist Amélie von Heydebreck's 'lightpaintings' are presented for the first time in a solo exhibition. For one week, the gallery space will be filled with mostly previously unseen set of works. On show are lightpainting on aluminium and paper as well as small sized paintings on paper from her 'dance' series.

Transformation, transitions, and the states of floating in between are at the heart of Amélie von Heydebreck's work. She is tracking and sensing the light and it's movement with her camera and transforming the sensation into painterly works in which the visualised energy seem to emerge from and continue it's eternal flow into the vastness. As for the content, the work seeks to explore the endless energetic pulsation and shifts we are part of.

TWO TIMES SPACETIME

It is an atom of a dust particle under an electron microscope, a distant galaxy in all its trembling glow. It is a bright speck on a dark backdrop, the trace of light, perceived and filtered through wool fibres and fabric, photographed, digitally transformed, and returned to the physical world as a colour print on aluminium. “Little Big Bang” is what Amélie von Heydebreck has called this work, and it lays bare many aspects important to her art: the picking out of light traces, the analogue-digital-painterly transformation of cosmic impulse, the searching for an appearance – whether photosensitive or colourful – in constant flux, in motion, almost like a dancer. The work’s title “Little Big Bang” suggests yet another fundamental motif: the mirroring of macrocosm and microcosm. For a big bang can only be small if within the small also lies the big, if a dust particle, or photon, can be found in the gigantic, alone barely visible or measurable, but in combination with many others, it shapes the world.

Amélie von Heydebreck is a trace collector who follows the movement of light and its colourful transformations. Even the finished picture is never the end; change is more than ever our only certainty – just as what is sculpted out of light seems to keep changing on the shimmering, rough background. Depending on one’s point of view, perception’s balancing act is found between visible pixels and imagined world soul; one disappears into colour field à la Rothko or pursues powerful yet fine structures à la Otto Piene – a good reference for Heydebreck – including when she dances on paper, clearly depicting structures of movement, somewhat reminiscent of Jorinde Voigt, but more spontaneous and gestural. 

The large-format series “Winds”, breathtakingly dazzling northern lights, clearly distinguishes her main colours. Red symbolises the body, blue the spirit; they play, fight, merge, they dance, they keep quiet, they shine. Colour-wise and content-wise, this leads to the structure of the diptych, where two images continually complement and contrast each other. Von Heydebreck’s large diptych “Time” unites nuances as if the viewer were lying on their back on the grass, gazing up at the cloudy sky. They look back and forth, suspended in a very slight, almost endless shift between bright and dark, light and colour, allowing spacetime to pulsate.

As a teenager, the artist discovered this energetic pulsation in Matisse’s painting La Danse from 1909/10. So impressed, an illustration of the artwork accompanied her from then on – The Dance of Modernity, mapping her own development over the years until the first “Lightpaintings” of 2021. By the way, the most important colours in Matisse’s La Danse: red and blue, as if the cosmos left traces.

Simon Elson

The Light Paints

[…] I wish for a sky in whose brightness slow and fast are the same, and people are like doves and doves like eagles.

I wish for a day that is clear and radiant and lasts, and a night and silence.

And the light is there, penetrating everything, and it is not I who paints, but the light.”

Otto Piene 1961

(Quoted from Otto Piene – Alchemist und Himmelsstürmer, Cologne 2019, p. 37)

Amélie von Heydebreck has exhibited previously as Kleindienst Gallery’s guest artist at Untitled Art Miami Beach in Miami, December 2022; at the group exhibition “Universe” curated by A. Hosemann at Projektraum Brunnenstrasse, Berlin, September 2022 and at “Day and Night in the Courts” in Berlin, September 2022.

Amélie von Heydebreck is a co-founder of the art magazine Monopol. She lives and works in Berlin.

Opening Hours:

Wednesday, April 19, 12 - 6 pm

Thursday, April 20, 12 - 6 pm

Friday, April 21, 12 - 6 pm

Saturday, April 22, 12 - 4 pm

Sunday, April 23, 12 - 4 pm

Finissage

April 24, 6 - 8 pm