Andrea Joyce Heimer

Andrea Joyce Heimer is garnering a wealth of attention in the wake of “Heartbreak on the high plains,” her new show of paintings and drawings at Nino Mier Gallery in Marfa, Texas, on view until June 17. These deeply personal, diaristic works build upon the artist’s distinctive, narrative style, this time tapping into the heartbreaks she’s experienced, from the romantic kind to family tragedies that she endured while growing up in Montana.

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The Fourth Annual Marfa Invitational, a contemporary art fair that brings artists and gallerists from across the globe to showcase their work in the remote arts destination, will kick off on Thursday — as founder Michael Phelan’s pledge to bring a permanent outpost for his foundation to the outskirts of town comes closer to fruition.

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Andrea Joyce Heimer presents 24 paintings representing each hour of the day she lost her virginity in a new show '24 Hours' in Great Falls, Montana at Nino Mier Gallery. Opening March 26th, the show follows that day in Heimer’s life through the lead up, through noon when the fateful event occurred, and finishing out the remainder of the disappointed hours. “I look back at that day and think that’s where the trouble began. Of course it’s not that simple, but those twenty-four hours were formative,” writes Heimer in her statement. “I still find myself downstairs when I should be up”.

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Nino Mier Gallery will present four group exhibitions featuring artists on their gallery roster, each on view for only one day at the gallery. While it’s common to replace artworks daily at art fairs as works are sold, Nino Mier’s pre-planned exhibitions allow for conversations to emerge between their artists, whose work becomes recontextualized with each curated display. 

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Andrea Joyce Heimer, an artist and former horse trainer, paints folksy figures who live side by side, yet are isolated. Ms. Heimer’s suburban subjects cook, sew, exercise and sleep in rooms that evoke cramped dollhouses, but their blank expressions convey an unsettling strain. The coronavirus pandemic now has the artist living out that very scenario at her home and studio in Ferndale, Wash., a small city almost 100 miles north of Seattle.

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Each of Andrea Joyce Heimer’s acrylic paintings begins as a written story. Even if the viewer isn’t able to know every detail of her narratives, the painter’s work gives us the chance to piece her myths ourselves. The artist offers some personal reasons why this process is so integral to her practice.

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In detailed tableaux, the painter, who works in Washington State, adapts the stylized red-and-black figures that adorn ancient Greek vases to explore a personal dilemma in epic terms. Adopted at birth, Heimer was recently given the choice to learn the names of her birth parents, thanks to a 2015 bill passed in her native Montana.

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Andrea Joyce Heimer makes small acrylic paintings of scenes from her adolescence and gives them long, narrative titles, which have been written directly onto the walls at Nicelle Beauchene gallery. These titles could pass for flash fiction, but the paintings, with their marbled colors, eccentric drawing style and razor-sharp edges, have an unfiltered excess of detail. What holds them together is their insight into the incongruity of early memories. Here, a house may retain its suggestion of depth while living people freeze in the midst of typical moments, and incidents linked by meandering chains of association all seem to happen at once. 

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The title of one of Andrea Joyce Heimer’s paintings is so long that Hometown had to bunch some of the words together on the checklist, deleting the spaces between them. Frequently exceeding twenty words and comprising one or more complete sentences, the titles of the works in this exhibition—her first solo show in New York—express sources of the artist’s broad-ranging envy.

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Massive amounts of expressive detail fill the paneled divisions in the work of artist Andrea Joyce Heimer. But don't let this description fool you, as Heimer doesn't make comic strips; she creates maximalist paintings characterized by voluptuous figures and multi-dimensional scenes of concurrent action. Within the same work, a couple stretches to a workout video while a woman seemingly masturbates with a teddy bear, a man dissects a rabbit, and another figure sews a blouse. When it comes to action, Heimer's painting seems to relish in the idea that "more is more."

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Memory is a useful faculty in a painter’s toolbox. It can be used to conjure the color of an emotion or deployed in the pursuit of perspective. It is the mind’s Instagram filter, tinting the images of our past. In the case of Washington-based artist Andrea Joyce Heimer, whose new exhibit, A Jealous Person, is currently on view at Hometown Gallery in Brooklyn (her first New York solo exhibition), memory is wielded as a powerful device for navigating neuroses borne of a set of formative experiences worthy of the Tenenbaum family, and with an equally pleasing palette to boot.

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Of all the deadly human sins, envy is perhaps the most unavoidable. It makes us mourn the things we never had in the first place while reminding us of what we have to loose. In “A Jealous Person”, Andrea Joyce Heimer’s new exhibition, the artist has made narrative, quilt-like paintings that year for some sense of firm identity. Her complex renderings of flattened domestic interiors and natural landscapes are psychological mini dramas. And there titles, though verbose, are deeply personal. 

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In advance of this weekend's Outsider Art Fair in New York City, I spoke with Andrea Joyce Heimer about her painting practice, her writing practice, and the beauty in people laughing at her work. Heimer is a self-taught painter who grew up in Montana and now lives and works in Washington state.

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