Kati Heck, Ins Büro!
December 23, 2015 – January 23, 2016

Opening: Friday, December 11, 6:00-8:00pm

It is with special delight that Corbett vs. Dempsey present Ins Büro!, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and sculpture by Kati Heck. This is the first show of the artist with CvsD and her Midwest premiere.

Born in Germany, Kati Heck is based in Antwerp, Belgium. With an intense and provocative sensibility that draws on historical precedents from Surrealism to Social Realism, Heck is a painter of astonishing facility, with an alchemical sensitivity to the human form and a devilish ironic streak. Her paintings incorporate strange scenarios, often sustained for a body of work, involving particular characters based on folks she invites into her studio. The resulting images constitute their own, highly unusual and particular world, a fantasy state, some of which is crafted in dreams. Arms are transparent, strange beasts enter the scene including an ostrich serving coffee to a couple on a futon; a young man’s pronounced varicose veins are matched by the other leg, which seems to be frozen; an animated man in a rocking chair holds a ball of light in one hand, the other submerged in a jar of pickles. This new group of works, which includes a mural-sized painting with a full range of haunting and haunted characters, conjures the supernatural in various ways, invoking a spiritual and material ecosystem as singular and peculiar as it is wondrous and open.

Kati Heck’s solo exhibitions include M HKA, Antwerp (forthcoming 2016), Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp (2014, 2011), CAD Malaga, Malaga, Spain (2013), Galerie Mario Mauroner, Vienna (2010), tellerschiff der Stadt, Frankfurt (2010), Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles (2009, 2006), Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2008), and Museum Het Domein, Sittart, The Netherlands (2008).

Ins Büro! is accompanied by a full-color 28-page catalog with an interview of Kati Heck by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey.