Disco Sublime

Paul Heyer & Anna Schachte

From: June 20 to August 1, 2009
Artist's Reception: Saturday June 20, 6-8pm

Proof Gallery is pleased to present Disco Sublime, new paintings by Paul Heyer and Anna Schachte. The two collaborated to “invent a new ruse for making their paintings, one that locates their shared penchants for opticality and ambiguous space in the mutable and surreal site of the dance floor.” Friends since meeting at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2005, fellow artists Paul Heyer and Anna Schachte, egg each other on by exchanging studio visits and checking out exhibitions together. Each of these artists takes a highly personal path to painterly abstraction while sharing a common approach of collaging illustrative fragments with literal, non-illusory applications of paint. Their conversations and camaraderie offer contrast to the often solitary and introverted nature of a studio practice, pushing and prodding at their individual doctrines and routines within painting.
Schachte’s paintings spin back and forth between locations scene and stage. The viewer becomes both performer and voyeur as imaginary scenarios pulse to life. Heyer captures the undifferentiated ecstasy of motion and music. His abstractions explore the spirituality of achieving an altered state through movement and the fragmented nature of consciousness in those moments. These two painters in conversation, cleverly frame and focus the recurring preoccupations of painterly abstraction: spirituality, geometries, perception, rhythm and repetition through their shared love of dance beats.

Originally from Olympia Fields, IL, Paul Heyer received a BA from Columbia University in 2004 and will complete his MFA at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2009. His work has been exhibited at Daniel Reich Gallery, NY, as well as in several other group exhibitions in New York City.

A native of Charleston, SC, Anna Schachte moved to Brooklyn, NY in 1998 upon receiving her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. In 2004, she received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and had her first solo show at Taxter and Spengemann Gallery, NY. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, and Chicago, as well as the traveling exhibition “Poets on Painters.”

- Paul Heyer's web site
- Anna Schachte's web site
- Flickr photostream of the exhibition