Artists

Julien Heintz

Press release

Contemporary Fine Arts presents Nouveaux Tableaux, the first solo exhibition of French artist Julien Heintz at the gallery, opening on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026. Installed on the ground floor, the show brings together new oil paintings that look to the last century not for spectacle, but for the pressure that remains within its records. Heintz uses photographs and documentary stills tied to episodes that marked Western culture, especially war and its aftermath. Yet he does not paint acts of cruelty directly. He turns instead to charged pauses and faces caught between events, attentive to the quiet weight that follows violence. What matters is not reconstruction for its own sake, but the possibility of handling trauma with care and restraint. Before painting, Heintz prepares every support with a gesso of marble powder, rabbit-skin glue, and water. It is dense and mineral. It recalls fresco and the Quattrocento artists he has studied closely. Across it, oil builds in successive layers. The making of each work is slow and exacting. Heintz values craftsmanship and wants every piece to exist as a finely wrought object. Repetition is part of that discipline, but never as routine.