Closing // "Practice makes perfect" - Björn Heyn

"Experience is better than theory"

Björn Heyn

04.07 - 02.08.2025

Gallery Against & Gap

The art of light seriousness

"So the art of the faces is that no artist came along and said, 'Yes, I'll take a thousand weeks for this and paint a really huge face with every single hair,' but rather they took colorful paints and painted a beautiful, funny face. And I like that better than when it's painted with such precision!"

My niece's assessment of Björn Heyn's work

A clear vision. And an accurate assessment, something many have long since lost. The first time I stood in Björn Heyn's studio, I immediately thought: I want to ask my niece what she thought of the works. Because Björn Heyn has somehow retained this childlike, open, attentive view of the world. Perhaps he has preserved it. Perhaps he consciously returns to it time and again.

It's hardly surprising: his family's close ties to the teaching profession, his own work as an art instructor for children, and his constant learning through engaging with young perspectives—all of this is reflected in his artistic practice. For Heyn, the child's point of view is not a design motif, but an epistemological starting point.

As a self-taught artist, he avoids academic routines. His painting is unconstrained, inquisitive, often playful. The colors are vibrant, the brushstrokes direct, the motifs charged with an immediacy that may initially seem naive. Apples, chairs, faces, still lifes; classically charged images appear, but not with the intention of quotation, rather as forms of possibility. What matters is the in-between, the interplay of form and color, the field of friction that arises through layering, disruption, or intensification.

In the art historical context, Heyn's approach aligns with a long line of positions that understand the immediate, the seemingly childlike or unlearned as a critical strategy. Henri Rousseau was already received in early modernism as a borderline figure, as someone who established a new visual language beyond academic conventions. In this context, it is also worth considering the artist Rose Wylie, whose deliberately awkward visual language can be interpreted as a radical statement against conventional discourses on painting. The often calculated naiveté in her works can also be read as a counterpoint to patriarchal symbolic systems. This reveals an attitude that is not anti-intellectual, but anti-hierarchical, and in this respect structurally related to Heyn's approach.

In Heyn's work, this impulse is neither theorized nor didactically formulated. It is palpable, in the gesture, the approach, the attitude toward the material. Technical perfection doesn't interest him. He chooses the indirect route, the refraction, the irregular. The humor inherent in many of his works is never merely illustration, but a means of creating distance. The lightness remains unsettling because it always touches upon the uncanny. The cheerful faces my niece speaks of leave viewers free rein in their interpretation. One thinks of dolls, of masks, of something that is exposed to a gaze but does not return it.

This ambivalence is a central aspect of the works. They defy clear interpretation and play with a poetry of incompleteness. The texts found in many of the images also contribute to this. They are fragments, turns of phrase, sometimes mere sentence remnants. An open dialogue emerges between word and image, reminiscent of Kippenberger, his laconic punchlines, his deliberate anti-psychology.

Materiality also plays a crucial role in Heyn's work. The canvases remain raw, their edges sometimes visible, sometimes concealed. Areas of color and materiality overlap without hesitation. Pictorial spaces often emerge from assemblage, collage, repetition, and playful disruption. The titles open up additional layers of interpretation, sometimes poetic, sometimes flippant, sometimes defiant. Yet they never seek to instruct or impose order. Rather, they allow for alternative approaches, leave gaps, and maintain a distance.

Heyn's work operates with an openness that has become rare today. It makes no demands, requires no prior knowledge. The works invite engagement without being intrusive. One doesn't need art historical tools to be drawn to them. The images are not ciphers waiting to be deciphered. They function in a mode of wonder—a state that art constantly strives to achieve and all too rarely finds.

Björn Heyn lives and works in Berlin. His paintings tell stories of figures, of everyday life, of the humor of failure. Of the power of questioning and the freedom not to have to give definitive answers. They are accessible without being pleasing, playful without seeming banal. And they are serious precisely because they dare to be light.

Text: Pola van den Hövel