Heike-Karin Föll

With a keen focus on the intricacies of drawing, painting, and writing, Heike-Karin Föll delves deep into the materiality and mechanisms inherent in these mediums. Her artistic endeavors seamlessly bridge the realms of everyday media reality, intertwining analog and digital texts and displays. 

Biography of Heike-Karin Föll

Heike-Karin Föll, born in 1967 in Bad Cannstatt, Germany, is a prominent contemporary artist currently based in Berlin. She embarked on her artistic journey by studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, followed by further education at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she honed her craft. Additionally, Föll delved into the realm of art history at the Freie Universität Berlin, enriching her understanding of the field.

With a distinguished career spanning decades, Föll now holds the esteemed position of Professor of Drawing at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she imparts her knowledge and expertise to aspiring artists.

Föll's artistic prowess has been showcased in numerous exhibitions worldwide. Notable among these is her major solo exhibition at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2019. Her works have also graced esteemed venues such as the Centre d'Art Neuchâtel in Switzerland (2018), the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin (2016), and the Mumok in Vienna (2016), among others.

Exploring Scale and Medium: The "Blushing" Exhibition by Heike-Karin Föll

The exhibition "Blushing" delves into the question of how small-scale artworks adapt to the contemporary context, particularly in light of the pandemic.

At the heart of the installation is "My Brain," where standard A4 paper serves as the canvas for a variety of artistic operations, including drawing, coloring, xeroxing, printing, sketching, and note-taking. These individual pages are presented on the wall, reflecting both the artist's creative process and the digital aesthetics of organized folders on a computer desktop.

In "Blushing," Föll expands her exploration of small formats to include canvas and painter's cardboard, imbuing them with a newfound solidity while retaining their intimate dimensions.

The exhibition also features larger formats, notably in the "scratch series," where brush movements traverse canvases in gestures reminiscent of smartphone interactions—swiping left, swiping right, and tapping. Against the compactness of the small format, these larger canvases articulate a lighter, looser, and sometimes fragile mode of organization, offering a contrast in scale and aesthetic expression.