Stray Beams – Elene Chantladze, Stefanie Heinze

Bringing together Stefanie Heinze and Elene Chantladze, this exhibition stages a conversation between two painters whose practices are separated by generation, geography, and context, yet united by a shared commitment to painting as an open, living process.

This marks the first time the two artists are shown together. While their backgrounds differ significantly, Chantladze is self-taught, whereas Heinze received classical training, their works converge through a shared emphasis on the empirical: painting as something learned through use, observation, repetition, and trust rather than explanation.

Both practices approach painting as a temporal and intuitive act, shaped by lived and imagined experience. Images emerge slowly and unevenly. Light operates not as metaphor but as condition, a source, a pressure, a way forms come into being and fall away again. Painting here is not illustrative; it is navigational.

Bodies in these works function as celestial bodies, not symbolic figures, but orienting presences. Like astrology, tarot, or the Chinese zodiac, they offer systems for thinking, yearning, and recalibration, tools for locating oneself within uncertainty. These bodies operate through experience rather than proof. They provide stability without finality. Rather than fairy tales, the works feel fairy-like: intuitive, porous, and slightly off-register. They resist linear narrative in favor of atmosphere and sensation. Chantladze’s paintings unfold through accumulation, figures, text, and marks sharing space without hierarchy, as if painting were a way of staying close to experience rather than resolving it. Her surfaces carry time, touch, and intimacy.

Heinze’s paintings move through transformation and instability. Bodies fracture, recombine, and drift toward abstraction. Humor and unease coexist, allowing forms to remain open and emotionally charged. Meaning is not fixed but felt, arriving through proximity and association.

Across both practices, celestial bodies also carry a quieter promise, a sense of yearning, continuity, and care. They suggest a better world not through idealization, but through persistence. A stabilizing force. A distant yet reliable presence. Perhaps even a matriarchal one.

Stray Beams holds painting as something both wild and grounding, empirical yet romantic, unstable yet sustaining. A field in which images do not explain themselves, but offer orientation, companionship, and moments of wild movement.