Biography

"A Universal String" Exhibition
Opening 16 March 2023 Grainger Gallery

Stefan Heyer is a German contemporary artist working in the Baix Empordà, Catalunya, Spain. His gestural abstracts are an exploration of histories, both personal and shared, and are inspired by pop culture, the esoteric and philosophical issues of our postmodern digital age, alienation, nature and history. Coming from a working-class background, his journey to a career in the arts was not born of privilege, but of passion.

Inspired by the DIY attitude of the 80s and 90s, it was this aesthetic underground rather than formal academic training that he developed his style and artistic language. After a career in fashion as an art and creative director, Stefan Heyer became a full-time artist in 2008. His work can be found in private collections around the world. He is represented by galleries in the USA ( Gallery MAR, Utah and Simchowitz/ Creative Partners in Los Angeles), Grainger Gallery (Australia), DB Contemporary Art (Düsseldorf, Germany) and Kunsthaus Artes (Hannover/Berlin, Germany).

Stefan Heyer’s works are extremely layered, dripping paint, scrawling words on the canvas, and mixing mediums including oil, acrylic, crayon, pencil, marker, and photo transfer. He describes his process as combining the intuitive physicality of high-energy trance-like strokes and mark-making with a more cerebral, meditative process.

Beginning the process with photographic images, laying down a grid - sometimes balanced, sometimes conscientiously the opposite - he transfers in an analogue way onto the canvas, continuing to create his Welten (worlds) with his oil paints to let the painting materialise.

Being in a heightened, free state of mind, Stefan attains an automative response. It’s this masterful blend of spontaneity and premeditation that give Heyer’s abstract pieces their intriguing complexity.