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SERVED COLD
ANDREA JOYCE HEIMER
MAY 9 - JUNE 21, 2025
GAA NEW YORK
“These paintings are revenge fantasies, plain and simple… In this group of paintings I enact over-the-top revenge on the people and places that have hurt me most.”
– Andrea Joyce Heimer
Gaa is pleased to present Served Cold, a new body of paintings by Andrea Joyce Heimer. While these works demonstrate Heimer’s dedication to exploring the theme of loneliness and the range of emotions that accompany this experience, they place a distinct focus on one emotion in particular: anger. Completed within the last six months, these ‘revenge fantasies’ confront painful realities and provide a physical conduit for allegorical anger, wrath, retribution, and revenge. Served Cold represents Heimer’s first solo exhibition with Gaa.
Functioning as visual memoirs, Heimer’s paintings explore the ‘origin story’ of an individual moment as it is mythically reimagined across her teeming compositions. Influenced by the ambiguity surrounding her own origin and closed adoption, Heimer utilizes her narrative-based painting practice as an outlet to process emotion, a method to unpack trauma, and a space to interpret her own story. The panoramic memories embedded within the resulting works in Served Cold span across her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, addressing the anger evoked by particular people, places, and circumstances.
Ironically, but perhaps indicatively, the purpose of these ‘revenge fantasies’ does not involve any form of valid threat; rather, these works pave a path of psychological admonition through which Heimer achieves her vengeance. Certain spectacles of retaliation involve Heimer’s direct participation, as demonstrated in You Were The Coldest Person I Tried To Love And The Worst Part Is You Think That Coldness Makes You Interesting. I Now Feed You To An Ice Monster, An Act You Accept Without Struggle Because You Are Too Cool To Care. Afterwards, I Briefly Think About How Bad You Were In Bed., which depicts the artist enacting over-the-top revenge on her emotionally frozen ex, whom she feeds to an ice monster in an arctic sea. Others, such as The Kitchen Where I Was Told I Was Adopted Just Sat There, Being A Kitchen, As My Life Turned Upside Down. At Least It Could Have Had The Decency To Self Destruct. devote importance to time and place, ruminating on the ways in which prolonged memory can intensify, proliferate, and transform into intensely personal myth over time.
Through her contemporary interpretation of narrative painting, Heimer creates and records her own history with the distinctive use of stylized symbols and iconography. Informed by the black- and red-figure techniques of Greek vase-painting, the narrative quality of Egyptian wall friezes, and the sumptuous flatness of Medieval paintings, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts, Heimer forgoes traditional notions of perspective and depth to imbue a sense of presence and immediacy within these stories. The diaristic titles introduce another avenue for meaning and understanding, didactically recounting the events portrayed and thus forming a thread of connectivity between Heimer and the viewer.
As such, Heimer creates the direct antithesis to the loneliness she so painstakingly unpacks and explores – paintings which, through their insistence upon history, memory, and narrative, prevent anyone from feeling truly alone in their presence.
Andrea Joyce Heimer (b. 1981, Great Falls, Montana, USA) is an artist whose painting and drawing practice investigates the subject of loneliness—largely informed by autobiographical stories such as her own adoption—to examine how humans experience feeling alone and its connection to how and why we make art. Heimer’s paintings evoke narratives where landscapes and interiors are organized into distinct rows, each portraying a different stage in the lives of her characters. Throughout her work, Heimer demonstrates an interest in origins. Her work contains a complex and imaginative use of symbolic figures referencing the Garden of Eden and Greek mythology, while also creating and recording her own history and personal mythologies. Heimer lives and works in Ferndale, Washington. Heimer received her MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire and has held teaching appointments at Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland, OR; Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA; and Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Gaa, New York, NY; Museum of Arts + Culture, Spokane, WA; Nino Mier Gallery, Half Gallery, and The Good Luck Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY; Parlor Gallery, Asbury Park, NJ; Maxwell Colette Gallery, Chicago, IL; Nino Mier Gallery, Marfa, TX; Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle, WA; Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA; idrawalot Collective, Berlin, Germany; and The Centre of International Contemporary Art Vancouver, BC, Canada, among others. Additionally her work has be included in group exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Half Gallery, and Edlin Gallery, in New York, NY; The Museum of Craft and Design, San Fransisco, CA; Bemis Center, Omaha, NE, 12.26 Gallery, Dallas, TX; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work has been covered in outlets including Artforum, Art in America, Huffington Post, New York Times, The New Yorker, New American Paintings, and The Wall Street Journal.