Heide Fasnacht

Heide Fasnacht (born 12 January 1951) is a New York City-based artist who works in sculpture, drawing, painting and installation art. Her work explores states of flux, instability and transformation caused by human action (architectural and cultural change, war, economics) and natural events (weather, geological processes). Since the mid-1990s, she has been known for sculptures and drawings that recreate momentary phenomena such as sneezes, geysers and demolitions—in sometimes abstract or cartoony form—that are temporally and spatially "frozen" for consideration of their aesthetic, perceptual, social or sensate qualities. ARTnews critic Ken Shulman has described her work as "chart[ing] the fluid dialogue between second and third dimensions, motion and inertia, creation and ruin." Heide Fasnacht, Demo, graphite powder in matte medium on neoprene and styrofoam, 112" x 125" x 120", 2000.

Fasnacht has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Anonymous Was A Woman, among others.

Work and reception After receiving early recognition for her abstract sculpture in the 1980s, Fasnacht began creating stop-action-like sculpture and precise drawings of ephemeral, sudden or violent events in the mid-1990s, based on photographs from dated science textbooks and magazines. In the later 1980s, she shifted to spiky, skeletal, machine-like freestanding works that critics related to the early modernist interest in circuses, sideshows and performance. Her early 1990s work signaled a turn to the human body, with slow, pensive objects made of rusted iron or sheets of thick rubber whose drooping forms conjured tongues (Terra Lingua, 1990) or peeling skin.

Heide Fasnacht, Jump Zone, vinyl tape, styrofoam, and neoprene, 180" x 204" x 180", 2008. Installed at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City.

Photography-based work (1996– ) Fasnacht broke from overtly abstract work around 1996 in transitional wall reliefs that used preexisting schematic renderings and photographs of star clusters or land masses as a point of departure (e.g., Strange Attractors, 1997). In subsequent sculpture and drawings, she borrowed from stop-action photographs of explosive forces involving wind, air, movement and space. Demo froze the implosion of a building in mid-air, complete with highly textured, blackened falling bricks and signage letters, flying shards and oozed neoprene smoke resembling popcorn; After 9/11, Fasnacht turned from explosions to more celebratory and meditative drawings of civic parades and fireworks, exploding champagne bottles, and water occurrences that suggested both mourning and renewal.

Between 2005 and 2008, Fasnacht created a series of perceptually challenging wall and floor drawings/installations executed in tape, which collapsed gallery and drawing spaces with anamorphic optical effects that read like dematerialized architectural renderings. The centerpiece of one show, Jump Zone (2005–8), occupied a corner, exploiting perspective and visual illusion to suggest a solid, three-dimensional object exploding outward with flying girders and popcorn-like smoke and detritus;

From 2008 to 2012, Fasnacht researched and examined the historic pilfering and destruction of artistic and cultural materials during times of war and authoritarian repression, from World War II to the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. This work culminated in her show "Loot" (Kent Gallery, 2012), which featured black-and-white historical images of seized artifacts and personal effects, store rooms and rubble that she digitally altered and cut out, in formats from small framed pieces to wall-sized installations. Suspect Terrain (2014–5) was a 50-foot-wide temporary installation commissioned for Socrates Sculpture Park, which derived from a photograph of a massive sinkhole that opened in Guangzhou, China. Her drawings have been noted for their refinement, drafting skill and varied mark-making, which can include crosshatching, newsprint-like rendered dots and actual holes, among other techniques. Critics have compared them to Impressionist landscapes or Agnes Martin grid paintings that metamorphose upon close inspection, the Pop-Conceptualist hybrids of Sigmar Polke, and the drawings of Alberto Giacometti, which render transient qualities as sculptural or stable.

Heide Fasnacht, Turbulence, acrylic paint on manipulated photo mounted on wood panel, 48" x 60", 2019. The "Playgrounds & -topias" series (2019–20) focuses on the ghosts of rural or suburban, 1950s and 1960s sites of childhood play: swing sets, seesaws, rollercoasters and jungle gyms that explore memory and fallibility, possibility and danger, loss and "unclaimed reminiscences," according to Nancy Princenthal. She began exhibiting regularly with her first solo show at PS1 in 1979, followed by others at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Vanderwoude-Tananbaum Gallery and Germans van Eck Gallery (both New York) in her first decade. She subsequently had solo exhibitions at the Bernard Toale Gallery (Boston, 1996–2007), Worcester Art Museum (2000) and Virginia Commonwealth University (2004, mid-career retrospective), among others. She has been featured in Documenta 6 and group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum at the Equitable Center, Fogg Art Museum, High Museum of Art, Museum Arnhem (Netherlands), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Rose Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Fundacio Sorigue (Spain), among others.