Kati Heck’s Dear Cobalt Monsters features seven recent oil paintings and one cast-iron sculpture that thread together visual cues from medieval allegory with a contemporary sensibility. This exhibition, presented by British gallery Sadie Coles HQ, marks the Antwerp-based German artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. The works demonstrate Heck’s masterful technical ability: precise, expressive compositions that range from stylized portraits to human-animal amalgams. These figures, set against flat, otherworldly vistas, create dramatic contrasts that make her cobalt blues and flesh tones pop with extraordinary intensity, while their surreal elements transform the compositions into something redolent of ancient myth.

Heck’s imaginative figures place her firmly in dialogue with late medieval painters, whose religious inspiration she clearly admires. Like Bosch, Heck deliberately exaggerates reality by manipulating form and perspective. “Art history functions as a rich reference aid,” she has said. “Playing around with motifs, colours and compositions that have been done in the past, and have proven to work, is a part of my investigation and toolbox. I’m especially fascinated by the Middle Ages.” The influence is evident: Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490–1510). Both works include a mixture of recognizable animals alongside impossible creatures, which combine features from multiple species. Heck continues the medieval tradition of rendering the fantastic palpable.

The exhibition’s three titular monsters—Juno, self, and kid, schuppig—are intimate-scale works that anchor the show. Monster (Juno),2025, features a canine-bird-reptile in a sweet, docile stance. Monster (self), 2025, presents a black Labrador with a human face and serpentine tail; the figure’s melancholic expression perhaps reflects her belief that “whoever you are painting, I suppose you are making a portrait of yourself.” Monster (kid, schuppig), 2004, displays a creature with human feet, a bird’s head with a two-toned beak, and feathers that cascade like a dress. Where Bosch used his chimeric creatures to confront spiritual truths for a medieval Christian world, Heck offers her hybrids as a way to unearth latent questions of identity and faith in a secular age. These paintings probe contemporary attitudes toward the supernatural, and what once might have terrified medieval onlookers as demonic now appears approachable or whimsical. This shift speaks to a fundamentally changed relationship with what might be considered demonic or divine.

The show’s four larger compositions—Kraft I (Walter kommt), Kraft II, Classic V, and Vom Unten, all 2025—serve as grounding counterpoints to the monsters, yet even these “human” figures exist within Heck’s destabilized reality. The ambitious Classic V, featuring an allegorical deathbed scene with figures in period costumes, demonstrates Heck’s ability to work on a grand scale while maintaining her intimate psychological focus. Rendered against dreamlike expanses populated with architectural fragments and phantom forms that emerge from clouds and drapery, with compositional elements that fragment or distort the body—a severed hand here, disproportionate limbs there—these works mirror the hybridity of their chimeric counterparts through the same surreal logic.

Placed in the gallery alongside the monsters, Heck’s portraits suggest that monstrous transformation remains perpetually possible. The exhibition also includes a cast-iron sculpture with a hidden fog machine beneath to release vapor out of a figure’s nose. The piece extends the artist’s exploration of hybrid forms into three dimensions, creating a tactile counterpoint to the painted fantasies. Taken all together, the show seems to say: even as contemporary viewers have moved beyond medieval religious certainties, the everyday and the mythic continue their ancient dialogue in the liminal realm of dreams.

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Dear Cobalt Monsters was on view at Bortolami Gallery from June 6 to August 8, 2025.

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