Thilo Heinzmann
Keep On

3 MAR until 4 APR 2026
Opening 28 FEB 2026, 6-9 pm

At Linienstrasse 155,
10115 Berlin

Thilo Heinzmann’s Keep On, his fourth solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, features a selection of the artist’s sand paintings, the results of a new technique presented here following the release of his most recent monograph. With this latest development in his engagement with composition, texture and color, Heinzmann inverts the white of his pigment paintings, transforming it to black – a non-color that suspends sand and fragments of glass between subtractive gestures and upon black-on-black impasto applications – summoning a reflective, ever-shifting depth. For these works, he takes as precedent his past three decades of creation and of painterly investigation into his medium’s antagonisms and its fusions, its concepts and its process, its chaos and its precision, its traditions and its evolutions. With reductionism and restraint, Heinzmann imbues his works’ elements with dualities that at once build upon and question one another.

Heinzmann’s painterly practice is, in a medium whose outer limits often appear to have been extensively explored, a constant, continued search for the new – a pursuit conducted using everything from Styrofoam and parchment to aluminum, chipboard and unbound pigment, their potential revealed in on-canvas contributions to artistic discourses. Repetition and variation in his work are led by curiosity, joy, play and technical proficiency exercised under strict rules, all joined to complex imagery. Surface and composition become a singular, distinct presence as materiality, texture and reflection concentrate to establish a foundation for this grouping of sand paintings. 

Chance and the physical meet among the pathways, channels and topography of Heinzmann’s sand paintings, as parts of a methodology in stark contrast to that of his pigment paintings – works that see wind assist fine, unbound particles of color onto canvas. Here grains of sand, in their infinite diversity, impart a stabilizing quality that translates the chromaticism of fleeting pigments into shimmering texture. Heinzmann’s assorted sands are punctuated by colored, hand-broken glass, the shards of which become reflective bodies connecting sand and thick black paint. The lines and contours, scored into the still-wet oil of his sand and pigment paintings with paint brushes, squeegees and fingers, stand as dynamic, guiding constants, having first taken root in his Tacmos (2010s) – an earlier group of all-black paintings. While these previous works wear protective acrylic-glass covers, his sand paintings do not. Instead, their monochromatic ground is left unhindered to conjure extraordinary depth and, in turn, to redirect the eye to the properties of light and the effects of its refraction. Heinzmann’s black concentrates the works’ elements, compacting them in a mode that runs counter to that of his pigment paintings. In an ongoing exchange with his own oeuvre, the viewer and the history of art, the artist paints distillations of his focused approaches, presenting a glimpse of those still to come. 

Thilo Heinzmann (b. 1969) has been the subject of exhibitions at international institutions including Too much is not enough!, Neue Galerie Graz, Graz (2019); Per Amor a l’Art Collection. Ornament = Crime?, Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia (2017); Painting Forever!, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013); Masterpieces of Painting in the Collection of the IVAM: Past, Present and Future, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia (2011); Hotel Marienbad 002: Sammlung Rausch, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2008); Kurator 2007/2008: Das Grosse Nichts, Gebert Stiftung für Kultur, Rapperswil-Jona (2008); Ketzer & Co, The Brno House of Arts, Brno (2006); 36 x 27 x 10, Volkspalast, Berlin (2005); deutschemalereizweitausenddrei, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (2003); Viva November, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2001); Malerei, INIT Kunsthalle, Berlin (1999); Offencia Europa, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna (1999); and Junge Szene, Secession, Vienna (1998). Heinzmann lives and works in Berlin, where he has taught painting and drawing at Universität der Künste since 2018.

Monograph: Thilo Heinzmann, Scheidegger & Spiess (Zurich) 2025, 272 pages, 233 color plates, German/English