Kati Heck's Mahler-Inspired Paintings and Sculpture at Sadie Coles HQ

Kati Heck's exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in London features six large paintings inspired by Gustav Mahler's 1911 symphony Das Lied von der Erde, which itself draws from Tang dynasty Chinese poetry. The works, created in 2017, depict bohemian figures in north European settings—bars, lakesides, and rock bands—exploring themes of joy, friendship, and life's transience. Heck's surreal and anarchic style incorporates historical echoes of artists like Otto Dix, DDR socialist realism, Lucian Freud, and Francis Picabia, while introducing bizarre malfunctions: limbs disintegrate, shoes blend into tiles, and naturalistic modeling breaks into flat sketches. The word 'bingo' appears in two paintings as an involuntary reflex. An adjoining space includes a soft sculpture with a whitish spiraling sausage-arm and a screen looping Der springende Punkt case II: O, featuring Heck's alter ego Babydetektiv in a psychedelic narrative involving a Heimlich maneuver and an egg. The sculpture's plinth bears an inscription from the Babydetektivclub manifesto rejecting definitive ideologies. The exhibition, titled Heimlich Manoeuvre, runs from 23 November to 10 February and is reviewed in the January & February 2018 issue of ArtReview. Heck, a German-born artist based in Antwerp, uses painting to explore sociability, implicating passion and friendship without opposing self-consciousness or historical knowledge.