Charline von Heyl’s edition for Texte zur Kunst is a linocut titled “Girl.” The motif is rendered by black contours on a bicolor background printed using the “rainbow” technique: the relatively aggressive pink of the upper third blends with the cerebral yellow rising from the bottom in a gradient of orange hues that aligns with the motif’s bipartite organization. Structured by the black lines of the linocut, the print’s bottom half shows a face head-on, the hair parted at the center of the picture, its symmetrical wavy lines extending out to the black frame. Reminiscent of both art-nouveau designs and psychedelia, von Heyl’s decorative line pattern doubles the incongruence between title and motif: von Heyl's “girl,” appearing here as lion.

Long an important benchmark in the discourse on painting in the pages of this journal, von Heyl’s art returns, with this edition, to printmaking — a form with which it is often associated. Yet, here, it is less the means of visual production that the communicative limits of image and word that are subject to strange metamorphotic displacement. In turn, von Heyl opens up a space of alternate interrelations and transferences of meaning: a new kind of girl power gazing at us with unblinking, possibly sinister eyes.