The Rose Art Museum's Lower Gerald S. and Sandra Fineberg Gallery was packed full last Wednesday evening as Charline Von Heyl, one of the two artists featured in the current exhibit The Matter That Surrounds Us, spoke about her work. She participated in a question-and-answer session with Katy Siegel, the curator-at-large for the museum, and the two engaged in dialogue about the exhibit, Heyl's artistic process.

The Matter That Surrounds Us features Von Heyl's drawn, painted and collaged pieces, staged with works in similar mediums by early-20th century German artist Wols. The exhibit is one of the first initiatives of the Rose Projects, a program created by museum director Christopher Bedford. When he introduced the speakers and the exhibit on Wednesday, Bedford said that the project strives to "look thematically across the history of art" and focus on the "voice of the curator."

Other Rose Projects include the video installations such as Rose Video 03, now on view in the Lee Gallery, which pairs Mary Reid Kelley's current work with Maria Lassnig's mid-20th century work. 

The gallery itself presented a very interesting visual space for the talk. Attendees sat in the center of the space, encompassed on all sides by The Matter That Surrounds Us. Looking up from their seats, they got an artistic perspective of a winding staircase leading up to the baby blue walls of Chris Burden's exhibit, Master Builder, which is staged on the ground floor of the museum.

Siegel started off by recalling the first time she spoke with Von Heyl about possibly pairing her work with Wols' work. At first, Siegel reflected, the artist was against the pairing. On Wednesday, Siegel asked Von Heyl to recall her thoughts when first presented with the idea. "I didn't see how it would directly link to my work," Von Heyl remembered.
Von Heyl eventually came around to the idea, though, and she is now very impressed with the way the exhibit, as she says, "changes [a viewer's] way of looking." 

Siegel questioned Von Heyl about her, as she called it, "improper," technique, noting how in her art, she does not make a point to distinguish between the mediums of drawing and painting. 

"I don't see it as improper," Von Heyl stated She rather sees herself as a scientist, experimenting with art, she said. Von Heyl also noted that it is not important for her work to fit in a category, and suggested that the concept of a category appears to be a "dated" one. 

Seeing The Matter That Surrounds Us for the first time, the contrast in size between the Wols pieces and the Von Heyl pieces is striking. Wols' pieces are extremely small, intricate and intensely complex while Von Heyl's pieces stand massive and engage with broader strokes as well as with smaller ones. 

In the talk, Von Heyl discussed this discrepancy in size between her own work and Wols'. She always liked small-scale, intricate works, she said, but wanted to translate these smaller works into larger paintings. Von Heyl said she paints most of her paintings on a "human scale," that is, when you look at a one of her paintings, it fills your vision completely. It "[takes] over your visual space," Von Heyl commented. 

Von Heyl also talked about the visceral aspect of painting. For Von Heyl, painting is a bodily experience. She is drawn to painting because of the way in which it engages with your whole being as you paint brushstrokes from one end of the canvas to the other. It is clear how Von Heyl would definitely need to use her whole being in painting the life-size canvases with which she works. 

In spite of this, Von Heyl does not discriminate against smaller-scale art such as drawing and collages simply because they do not inherently lend themselves to a full, corporeal experience. Von Heyl makes use other ways of engaging her being in her smaller-scale pieces. With her collages that are on a smaller scale, Von Heyl described how she would lay out a large array of torn paper pieces and sit down among the pieces, arranging them until she liked the way they looked. 

During the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience asked Von Heyl about the differences in technology that Von Heyl is able to use today compared to when Wols was alive. 

Von Heyl responded by saying that "if Wols would have had an Epson printer, he would have been crazy about it too," suggesting that technology does not inhibit art but rather adds an extra convenience. 

In addition to her work shown at the Rose, Von Heyl's collages are currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.