Gallery O-68 is proud to present the work of New York-based Dutch artist Wieteke Heldens. This presentation includes paintings from two ongoing and related bodies of work: Legends and the more recent Still Counting.
In the two Legends paintings in this presentation, viewers can see dots, scribbles and other marks made with different colors and media on an apparently raw and empty canvas. These
features reflect their remarkable origin story. In her early thirties, Heldens unexpectedly found herself in a hospital’s ICU unit. While lying there in critical care, she looked around the room
and started counting the colors she saw. The colors came to exist in her mind without relation to their corresponding forms and objects. Once she got out of the hospital and back into her
studio, she took her experience of counting these colors and transferred it into a new body of work where each of the colors she had on hand at the studio—paints, colored pencils, markers,
etc.—became an enumerated color in her new paintings. Each color is captioned with a number in a similar way to what you would see on a map legend. Over time, Heldens has made Legends paintings all over the world, from her studios in The Hague and New York City and during visits to Turin and South Korea.
The Still Counting paintings are characterized by canvases awash in abundant color. After applying pours and drips to the canvas, she turns the painting upside down while it is still wet. The resulting painting comes as a surprise to the artist. It is at that moment that she too sees the new painting as if for the first time, much in the same way that viewers first encounter her work.
According to Heldens, as she turns her painting upside down, the downside becomes the upside. While this description initially refers to the physics of making the artwork, it also reveals
Heldens’ attitudes toward artmarking and culture in general. In these paintings, Heldens turns the vocabulary of a pop culture obsessed with upsides and downsides upside down. She reveals
an ambivalence about whether one orientation or another is correct—or even preferred. This is in keeping with her overall approach to making art, which is characterized by getting
comfortable with discomfort. There is certainly something unsettling about looking at the paintings and seeing drips that seem to defy gravity. You might even wonder if the paintings are
installed correctly; but a look at the numbers indicates that upside down is indeed right side up. Continuing the practice of counting begun in the Legends paintings, in the Still Counting
paintings the artist has counted each drip, always starting with the number 1, and marking each one with a red dot. Then a small number, stenciled onto another canvas and cut from it, gets
adhered to the painting, just above each of the red dots.
Heldens’ work has long been in conversation with certain artists. Beginning with the Legends paintings and continuing with the Still Counting paintings, viewers can see the nod to conceptual artist On Kawara and his own numbering systems. In the Still Counting paintings, you can see references to the lush color palettes of Willem de Kooning—most apparent in 57, 133 x 103—as well as Helen Frankenthaler’s techniques of physical pours and turning her canvases.
Perhaps most poignantly, the dimensions of all the paintings in this presentation refer directly to the precise dimensions of existing Hilma af Klint paintings. Bringing it all together, the title of each work captures all of these features with a formula: the number of drips, then the dimensions in centimeters. Heldens not only refers to Klint’s painting sizes and colors in the paintings presented here. She also captures a sense of open, spiritual communion with the canvas and with her materials. The
rules-based counting and numbering may form foundational principles for the artist, but in these new paintings, Heldens has achieved a fresh freedom in gesture. The Still Counting paintings feel unlocked and loose—and, one could argue, sublime.