Isabelle Heldenfels
Isabelle is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work explores the American family as both a political and spiritual body. Through painting, she examines how domestic archives (family photo albums, heirlooms, and household objects) become vessels of memory where the living and the dead quietly converge. Her compositions transform these fragments into dreamlike scenes that blur the boundaries between remembrance and imagination, presence and absence.
A lifelong artist, Isabelle returned to her painting practice after earning a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute in 2023. The discipline of architecture continues to inform her sense of spatial composition, structure, and conceptual logic, while painting allows her to translate those principles into reflections on her social and spiritual interests. Since returning to her practice, Isabelle has participated in numerous New York City group shows, including exhibitions at the Salmagundi Club, Galerie Shibumi, and 440 Gallery. In February 2025, she was interviewed for a feature in Art Seen Magazine, and in October 2025 she presented her debut solo exhibition with Hyacinth Gallery. Isabelle’s work is held in private collections internationally.
Artist Statement
In my painting practice, I explore the American family as both a political and spiritual body through the lens of domestic archives. Family photo albums and collections of nostalgic objects act as curated yet incomplete narratives, spaces where the living and the dead remain in quiet, mutual observation. My work attempts to locate my own position within this network of inherited memory and expectation, a place where love and dread, longing and repulsion, coexist.
In my compositions, family photographs and domestic artifacts emerge as dislocated apparitions within uncertain landscapes, allowing memory to fragment, distort, and reassemble. The resulting scenes often carry an uneasy stillness that is playfully offset by bright color, kitschy nostalgia, and echoes of American folklore, denying the viewer any fixed sense of time, perspective, or attitude.
What begins as an effort to preserve reveals itself as an act of release. My paintings embrace the mutability of memory and identity, suggesting that both are perpetually rewritten. Rather than seeking resolution or truth, I aim to evoke the shared experience of uncertainty—the strange comfort found in the spaces between remembrance and forgetting, presence and absence, the real and the imagined.
www.isabelleheldenfels.com
