In Belgian magazine Focus Knack June 2008, Els Fiers reviews German-born contemporary Belgian artist Kati HeckGoogle gallery at the occasion of Heck’s first museum expostion. Fiers likens her to Eija-Liisa Ahtila“Dog Bites”, Sam Taylor-Wood “A Little Death,” [YouTube] and Léopold Rabus Two girls and a mushroom.
Wood’s work I’ve learned to appreciate via dmtls a month or two ago, Ahtila and Rabus are so-so on first impression, and Heck, I’ve been a bit of a fan for some time. If placement she deserves, I will locate her in the tradition of the German Comic Grotesque, a category which Pamela Kort recently examined in her eponymous book and of which the earliest practitioners are Lovis Corinth, Paul Klee, Max Klinger, Otto Dix, Alfred Kubin, Kurt Schwitters, Emil Nolde, and the greatest of them all (and with Klinger and Corinth, the only ones in the beloved public domain), Arnold –“Isle of the Dead” —Böcklin.
Please notice the word comic in Comic Grotesque. If Heck is a great painter or not is not for me but for the market to decide, but I can say this: she has a sense of humor, and it’s a rosy kind of insouciance, of a cynical variety perhaps, but nevertheless one which invites genuine (as opposed to ironic) laughter.
Speaking of comic, I would like to offer you this piece of eye candy:
