Heide Fasnacht

Heide Fasnacht is a New York City-based artist who works in sculpture, drawing, painting and installation art. 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). 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. In the late 2010s, she has expanded these themes in paintings that examine lost and neglected childhood sites, such as playgrounds and amusement parks. 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."

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. 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.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023