Thilo Heinzmann

A collection of paintings from German artist Thilo Heinzmann’s diverse oeuvre.
 
For more than three decades, German artist Thilo Heinzmann has been expanding our understanding of what a painting can be. With a material palette spanning the extremes of commonplace—like chipboard, Styrofoam, and cotton wool—and rare, including precious, raw pigments from across the world, he has developed a singular visual language that is both rich and restrained.

The artist’s first monograph in a decade, Thilo Heinzmann: Works 1990–2025 charts his artistic evolution since the early 1990s, when he was a student of Thomas Bayrle at Frankfurt’s Städelschule and an assistant to Martin Kippenberger, through to the wind-blown bursts of unfixed pigments, glass shards, and rhythmic marks in oil paint of the “pigment paintings” that form the core of his art today. A conversation between Heinzmann and curator Mark Godfrey and an essay by writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen expand on the recurring fascinations with composition, color, and texture that structure his oeuvre, while author Vanessa Onwuemezi responds to his art in distinctive poetic prose.

Detailed reproductions of Heinzmann’s paintings allow the viewer to get close to their highly tactile surfaces.

Thilo Heinzmann is a German visual artist and professor of painting at Berlin University of the Arts. He is a graduate of Frankfurt’s renowned Städelschule, where he studied with Thomas Bayrle and worked as an assistant to Martin Kippenberger 1993–95.

Amy Sherlock is a London-based art critic and editor. Between 2016 and 2022 she was the deputy editor of Frieze art magazine. 

Maria Zinfert is a scholar of general and comparative literary studies and has been workig as studio manager of German artist Thilo Heinzmann in Berlin since 2023. Prior to that she taught as a DAAD visiting professor at the University of Montréal 2018–23.