Heidi

About the Gallery
Heidi was established in 2021 in Berlin. It intends to engage with the current narratives in contemporary art and culture, championing artists with strong aesthetic and inquiring sensibilities. It encourages intergenerational dialogue through an international programme that includes both emergent and more established practices. The gallery showcases artists who work across a range of media—be it painting, sculpture, photography, film, sound, performance, and installation-based work. Heidi aims to be an open and discursive space for artists, supporting them to give shape to their unique ideas and perspectives on the world.

About the Presentation
Will Sheldon (b. 1990) lives and works in New York. The artist’s work celebrates the history of art by weaving classical references into contemporary themes of subculture and aesthetics, revealing the continued resonance and relevance of the old masters in today’s culture. He engages with the past to enrich and inform our understanding of the present, and vice versa. Sheldon’s distinctive subjects—which range from ball-jointed dolls, studies of his creative collaborators, to eerie landscapes—are situated between times, playing with the idea of simulation and fantasy. His imagery carries an otherworldly atmosphere, evoking contrasts of seduction and repulsion, comfort and unease, intimacy and distance. Ever curious and experimental with his painterly process, he continually forges new directions, pushing the boundaries of his practice with each work, transforming every new piece into a progression of the last.

For Independent 2025, Will Sheldon will present a series of new paintings and drawings that will further his ongoing exploration of the amalgamation of classical iconography with contemporaneous elements and deepen his probing of interstitial and conflicted human affections.