Kylie Heidenheimer: Attenuated Figuration
Kylie Heidenheimer came to painting through an early interest in art restoration. After high school, she attended Grinnell College in Iowa, where she studied chemistry, art history, and 2-D studio art. Following her freshman year, she spent the summer as an art restoration intern at the Museum für Völkerkunde in then West Berlin. While there, she began drawing and painting with gouache on paper on her own. By the end of that summer, she had decided to pursue art seriously. Not long after, her focus shifted to oil painting.
Her path toward abstraction grew out of a strong foundation in figurative work. After her sophomore year at Grinnell, she returned to St. Louis to attend art school at Washington University. The core program was rigorous and heavily figurative, with intensive anatomy drawing and figure sculpture classes, followed by a return to painting.