Charline von Heyl was born in Germany and has lived in the United States since 1996. She lives and works between Marfa (Texas) and New York. She studied painting in Hamburg and Düsseldorf and participated in the Cologne art scene in the 1980s. Her first retrospective exhibition took place at Le Consortium in 2009. Her first museum exhibition in the United States was at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2005, followed by her first retrospective in the country at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia in 2011. In 2025, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her work is part of collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Tate Modern; Whitney Museum of American Art; Musée dA̓’rt Moderne de Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Kunstmuseum Bonn; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

She has had solo exhibitions at the George Economou Collection (2025); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2018); Deichtorhallen (2018); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (2018); Tate Liverpool (2012); and Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2012). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum (2024); Hill Art Foundation (2023); Le Consortium (2022); La Biennale di Venezia (2022); The Broad (2021); Carnegie Museum of Art (2021); The Kitchen (2020); and Museum Brandhorst (2019), among others.