Heide Fasnacht (born 12 January 1951) is a New York City-based artist who works in sculpture, drawing, painting and installation art.Glueck, Grace. "Heide Fasnacht: These Things Happen," The New York Times, November 6, 1998. Retrieved April 19, 2021.Whitney, Kathleen. "Love Gas and Invisible Objects: Heide Fasnacht’s Recent Sculpture," Sculpture, March 1999, p. 24–9.Carlock, Marty. "Heide Fasnacht, Bernard Toale Gallery," Sculpture, September 2006. 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).Princenthal, Nancy. "Heide Fasnacht: Exploded View," Art in America, February 2001, p. 124–9.Waxman, Lori. "Heide Fasnacht: Kent Gallery," Artforum, June 7, 2005. Retrieved April 21, 2021.Cullen, Cathy. "Vantage Points: Three Works at Socrates Sculpture Park," Hyperallergic, July 11, 2015. Retrieved April 21, 2021. 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.Hebron, Patrick. "Both Sides Now: Bruce Conner’s Crossroads and Heide Fasnacht’s Explosion," Bard College Journal of the Moving Image, Spring 2005, p. 45–9.Stoppani, Teresa. "Heide Fasnacht: Suspect Terrain" essay "Suspended Time" Lo Squaderno: Stratifications, Folds, De-stratifications, September 2015. In the late 2010s, she has expanded these themes in paintings that examine lost and neglected childhood sites, such as playgrounds and amusement parks.Princenthal, Nancy. Heide Fasnacht: Past Imperfect, Allentown, PA: Muhlenberg College, Martin Art Gallery, 2019.Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Heide Fasnacht, Artists. Retrieved April 15, 2021. 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."Shulman, Ken. "Heide Fasnacht," ARTnews, March 2006.
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.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Heide Fasnacht, Fellows. Retrieved April 21, 2021.Anonymous Was a Woman. 2019 Artists. Retrieved April 21, 2021.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Heide Fasnacht, Artists. Retrieved April 22, 2021. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Walker Art Center.Brooklyn Museum. Heide Ann Fasnacht, Artists. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Heide Fasnacht, Artists. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sneeze, Heide Fasnacht, Collections. Retrieved April 22, 2021.Socrates Sculpture Park. Heide Fasnacht, Artist. Retrieved April 15, 2021.
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.Westfall, Stephen. Review, Arts, February 1986.Princenthal, Nancy. Review, Art in America, November 1998.Curtis, Cathy. "Shaping Up: Heide Fasnacht," Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1990. Critics connected them to work by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Vija Celmins, but distinguished Fasnacht by her translation of two-dimensional sources into sculpture (rather than painting) that was "emphatically handmade" and open to fantasy, slippage of meaning, and abstraction.Rubinstein, Raphael. "Heide Fasnacht: A Poetics of Catastrophe," Heide Fasnacht: Strange Attractors, Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, Anderson Galleries, 2003.Princenthal, Nancy. "Blast Zones: Heide Fasnacht’s Recent Drawings," Art on Paper, September–October 1999, p.44–8.
Fasnacht's work plays with space, scale and time and in this sense relates to 1970s art that engaged in phenomenological explorations of experience, perception and objectivity.McDaniel, Craig and Jean Robertson. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 111–3, 145. Retrieved April 16, 2021. Nancy Princethal notes its focus on events that "fall at the threshold of visibility, in the realm of things that, while not imperceptible are more or less impossible to visualize in any stable, conventional way." Working at table-top to larger-than-human scale, Fasnacht has depicted cataclysmic events in miniature and minor experiences (e.g., sneezes) at great magnification, creating dissonances that lend moral ambiguity, paradox, and a sense of the absurd to her art. Her work's suspension of time converts moments of violence, loss or catharsis into objects of contemplation—of visual pleasure, danger, wonder, intellectual stimulation, foreboding or, paradoxically, humor—that Raphael Rubinstein described as "a kind of poetics of catastrophe." Her later paintings approach time differently, collapsing change and loss in the built environment across decades in single images.
Abstract sculpture (1977–1995) Fasnacht initially worked within the materials and process-oriented language of Postminimalism, producing abstract, mixed-media wall reliefs that were also informed by Constructivist geometry and African art.Glueck, Grace. Review] The New York Times, October 21, 1983, Sect. C, p. 27. Retrieved April 19, 2021.Zimmer, William. "Winners on Parade at the Neuberger," The New York Times, May 11, 1986, Sect. 11WC, p. 22. Retrieved April 19, 2021.Nadelman, Cynthia. "Gabo’s Progeny," ARTnews, December 1987. They often consisted of built-up planes of raw, painted and distressed laminated wood in combinations of cones, ovals on tilted axes, globes or spirals that The New York Times described as bristling with energy, impulsive and balletic.Kimmelman, Michael. Review, The New York Times, November 23, 1990, Sect. C, p. 4. Retrieved April 19, 2021.Brenson, Michael. "A Sculpture Revival All Around Town," The New York Times, November 1, 1985, Sect. C, p. 1. Retrieved April 19, 2021."Sculptural Interiors," The New York Times, November 18, 1988. Sect. C, p. 28. Retrieved April 19, 2021. 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.Brenson, Michael. "Heide Fasnacht at Germans van Eck," The New York Times, May 6, 1988. Retrieved April 19, 2021.Russell, John. Review, The New York Times, May 12, 1989. Retrieved April 19, 2021. 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.Borum, Jennifer P. "Heide Fasnacht at Germans van Eck," Artforum, March 1991. Retrieved April 19, 2021.
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).Heide Fasnacht website. Sculpture & Installation. Retrieved April 28, 2021. In subsequent sculpture and drawings, she borrowed from stop-action photographs of explosive forces involving wind, air, movement and space. Among the first was Little Sneeze (1997), a delicate sculpture with clumps of black and white polymer clotted around radiating vectors of wire, which issued from a wall. This work developed into larger works created by spraying neoprene through wire mesh that erupted from floors in a more unruly fashion: the graphite-coated Big Bang (1998) and Explosion (1998), which delineated different types of smoke in black, gray and white.
Two installation-like works from 2000 were later noted for their uncanny prophetic quality in light of the subsequent 9-11 attacks.Princenthal, Nancy. Heide Fasnacht: Drawn to Sublime, New York: Kent Gallery, 2003. 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; it references vanished 1950s landmarks from Fasnacht's native Midwest. The more violent and unsettling Exploding Plane offers a complex sense of space, drawing viewers' eyes into, around and through the work and its aluminum-gray scattering parts (including suitcases) suspended in midair.Kelly, James J. The Sculptural Idea, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004, p. 109–11.McQuaid, Cate. "Breaking down the beauty of Styrofoam," The Boston Globe, March 28, 2008. Retrieved April 19, 2021. 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.McQuaid, Cate. "With explosions, sculptor blows up the concept of illusion," The Boston Globe, November 4, 2005.
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.Hirsch, Faye. "Heide Fasnacht at Kent," Art in America, October 2007. 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; ARTnews described it as a "masterly representation of anxiety and disorientation." Similar works include New City (2007), which featured three wall drawings of exploded, skeletal one-room buildings with studs, beams and partial sheathing visible, and Stack (2008, Smack Mellon), which extended off corner walls onto the gallery floor.Stoppani, Teresa. "The Architecture of Explosive Slowness," Lo Squaderno: Space-Time-Speed, December 2012. p. 9–14.Cole, Lori. "Site 92: Phase II," Artforum, February 11, 2008. Retrieved April 21, 2021.
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.Miller, Leigh Anne. "The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won’t Want to Miss," Art in America, April 5, 2012. Retrieved April 20, 2021.Giovannotti, Micaela. Heide Fasnacht: Nothing Lasts Forever, Editions, 2014. 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.