In his new exhibition “Ätschi Bätsch”, Berlin-based artist Björn Heyn playfully sticks his tongue out at the audience. At first glance, his paintings appear playful, childlike, and fun, but on closer inspection, they reveal themselves as a rather complex game with layers of reality and illusion. Floral and fruit still lifes from classical art history collide with seemingly naïve forms of expression. The pleasure lies not only in this civil disobedience of mixing high and low culture; the “fun factor” unfolds as a veritable mental puzzle.

Flowers in vases and fruit in bowls on tables—this is the quintessential classical still life, familiar from centuries of art history. It continues to live on in countless décor tips and interior design ideas. And then there’s the table with chairs, another theme almost as old as humanity itself. We flood the various networks with recipes, social cooking events, and endless cooking shows. We invoke community, sociability, and coziness. Food truly seems important.

In Heyn’s paintings, the beauty of still lifes and the laid table meet an unbridled love of colors and patterns, surfaces and forms, through which he reformulates the order of things in an immediate way. Like children, he places objects in front of, beside, and on top of each other without regard for three-dimensional spatial logic. Tables and chairs appear—such as in “wir nehmen gerne noch ein paar Oliven”—strictly from the side or, at best, like the table in “manchmal male ich einfach Blumen 5” or the blue chair in “kann ich den, bitte?”, represented with receding perspective lines or viewed slightly from above, but never accurately in perspective; instead, they are awkwardly arranged within the plane. The round table in “weniger ist mehr” is given four peculiarly positioned legs in the manner of children’s drawings.

Heyn often places images within his images as distinguishable layers, such as the blue table with chairs on a red background in the upper right quadrant of “wir nehmen gerne noch ein paar Oliven”, or the pink-red floral painting with blue blossoms in “manchmal male ich einfach Blumen 5”. However, the flower stems grow from the table in front of the painting, and the blossoms extend beyond the picture plane, their edges supplemented with colored pencil on the bare, transparently primed canvas. So what belongs to the picture within the picture, and what to the painting itself, which depicts a space with a floral painting, a table, and a spherical vase figure in front of it?

Heyn intensifies this play with reality and illusion by incorporating collage elements. For example, the dish towel on the table in “manchmal male ich einfach Blumen 5” is a real piece that he glued in, while the vase figure is fully cut out, not merely the upper round form as it might appear—white with colored pencil scribbles, giving it a paper-like look. A piece of cord or cable in three loops in front of the table is painted with a slight shadow, creating the illusion of being physically attached.

Similarly, the blue thermos and three fruits on the table in “19:00 fünf Personen” are not glued but illusionistically painted, as are the peas on the dish towel mini-series “Lappen 1”, “Lappen 2”, and “Lappen 3”. In “wir nehmen gerne noch ein paar Oliven”, Heyn pays a direct homage to Baroque still lifes with a half-peeled lemon: the peel often curls over the edge of a bowl or table, creating the plastic effect of deep spatial layering, which Heyn subverts through the flat arrangement of the otherwise three-dimensional furniture and objects.

Baroque still lifes compete with reality through painterly translation of materials and textures, where spatial order and representation are crucial both for composition and symbolic meaning. A table, for instance, is not just a surface but also a spatial arrangement, and placing it correctly in perspective can be challenging—even for children. Their artistic appropriation of reality is inaccurate, clumsy, and awkward, yet convincingly immediate in expressing their own, not yet civilized, “adult” understanding of the world. Early modern artists similarly drew inspiration from so-called “naïve art”—from children, non-European cultures, or psychiatric patients—to reformulate their own evolving relationship with the world.

Björn Heyn follows a similar path. To preserve a spontaneous access to the order of things, to see the world anew and unfiltered, he begins with random placements and develops the work in many layers. Often, elements from the initial layers remain in the finished painting, the lowest layer becoming the topmost. To recapture elementary forms of expression akin to children’s, he modifies his painting or drawing tools with chunky blocks, mounts them on unwieldy rods, or even attempts to paint and draw with his feet.

When Heyn presents the laid table with chairs and still lifes of flowers and fruit seemingly naïvely, he touches on solutions that modern art has also explored: embracing rather than overcoming the gap between the two-dimensional surface and three-dimensional reality; transitioning from representational forms to ornamental patterns; and freeing painting and drawing techniques from the obligation to depict any form of reality.

Whether viewed from the perspective of art history, the experience of children’s art, or approached rationally or intuitively, Björn Heyn’s complex interplay of reality and illusion provides immense pleasure on all levels, stimulating not only the senses but also the intellect.

© Veronika Schöne 2026