Kati Heck @ Sadie Coles

Kati Heck presents a group of six new paintings, alongside two smaller portraits and a video sculpture. The exhibition is Heck’s first solo presentation in London. Throughout her work, she pursues art’s capacity to affront sensibilities and jolt the senses – acting as a Heimlich Manoeuvre within society.
Heck’s six large-scale paintings, installed in a hexagonal space, form an interrelated cycle on the themes of revelry, loneliness, youth, beauty, drunkenness and separation. The works are loosely based on Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (1909), a six-part symphony in which Chinese poems from the Tang dynasty (known to Mahler in German translation) are set to music.