For Heidi Stein, painting is a way of living and communicating, free of being pinned down, in search of a changing identity. Phases of creativity are thereby also phases of inner sensitivities to which the painter gives herself with brush and paint. Her pictorial ideas develop directly in the work process. The pictures, whether abstract compositions or figurative allusions, are a kind of window to the soul, authentic testimonies that give visual expression to her emotional world. Her stories are complex and naïve, understandable and disturbing, always stimulating, and above all emboldening and full of internal freedom.
Heidi Stein’s oeuvre cannot be pigeonholed as a particular stylistic direction or current. Expressionistic painting, American Abstract Expressionism, and the Neo-Fauves of the 1980s have all fascinated and inspired her. But she neither depends on role models, nor is she bound to any art diktat or concept. She is a passionate and big-hearted painter. Her often large-format works, powerful in color and form, testify to energy and display a deep feeling for life and its injuries.
Heidi Stein does not impose herself. One learns little about her pictures from her, herself. Through harmonious pictorial compositions and expressive coloration, she discretely conveys an existential tension whose origin lies in the Mediterranean and in the suggestiveness of dreams. The pictures call on viewers to add their own thoughts and feelings to the artist’s encoded messages. A touch of unrest and enchantment takes ahold of the viewer of these works that oscillate between the fairytale and magic. They accompany us directly into the dimension of the psyche, the unconscious. The human contours and landscapes that occasionally emerge before a nebulous background possess the lightness of mysterious, evanescent likenesses. Through them, our everyday life with its contradictions and yearnings almost seems more understandable.