Mini Me Mary / Albada Jelgersma Gallery, 2019

from press release:
„Mini Me Mary

Jule Korneffel in dialogue with Mary Heilmann

Albada Jelgersma Gallery is enthused to announce the exhibition of small and mid-sized paintings by the young German/American artist Jule Korneffel, together with the work “Idriss“ by the well-known and established artist Mary Heilmann. The show intends to inspire a dialogue about these two generations of (female) abstract painting.

The work of Jule Korneffel shows enthusiasm for life, spontaneity, and a sense of freedom. Her move from Cologne, Germany to NY was driven by her interest in American art and culture.

Korneffel mostly paints on canvas, sometimes onto the wall. While her practice follows an abstract style of inscriptive mark making she follows a minimalist sensibility. By allowing underpainting to be visible the paintings reveal a process of reduction. This demonstrates that the picture plane is a lived experience in which she is able to arrive at a precision of forms and colors by floating through its creation.

In her painterly practice Jule Korneffel explicitly relates to Mary Heilmann, a representative for Geometric Abstraction since the 1970s, who is known for challenging the rigorous codes of Minimalism by adding personal references to her geometric and simple painterly compositions.

Both Korneffel and Heilmann imbue personal experience into abstract language. Jule Korneffel identifies with what she calls “Heilmann’s real life quality,“ meaning to embody a sensational quality of space and time in painting. Even though reduced to an extreme both their compositions provide an open-endedness. It is the maker and/or viewer who completes them through their individual experience. —Painting becomes a living space.“

Mary Heilmann’s contribution:
Idriss, 24 x 30 inch./ 61 x 76cm
[Photo: Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich and 303 Gallery.]

Studio Mary Heilmann, NYC, May 2019.