Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce a major exhibition of works by Robert Heinecken. The exhibition will span more than thirty years and retrospect Heinecken’s vast range of photographic imagery, including photosculpture, photoprints, skiagrams and polaroids, among others.
Heinecken pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium, breaking through aesthetic and technical limitations, to realize photosculpture, conceptual photography and photographic cubism. An accomplished printmaker who seldom used a camera, he pioneered the integration of conventionally opposing mediums and unconventional processes into what he called paraphotography. His integration of photography and other media have often been compared to Robert Rauschenberg. Heinecken’s constructed images on magazines and mail order catalogs illustrate the power of mass media by collapsing the boundaries between the “real” and “manufactured.”
As the New York Times wrote in Heinecken’s 2006 obituary, “Instead of treating photographs as the autonomous creations of their makers, as did Ansel Adams and other postwar tastemakers, he viewed them as forms of cultural iconography that reflected the commercialism and venality of contemporary life. In this sense, he was a forerunner of appropriationist artists of the 1980's like Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, who borrowed and recontextualized existing photographic images culled from printed reproductions.”
Heinecken attended University of California at Los Angeles. After receiving his master’s degree in 1960, he was hired by the university where he remained for 31 years. In 1963, founded the photography department at UCLA and helped found the Society for Photographic Education in 1964, serving as chairman in 1970 and 1971. Two recent exhibitions include major retrospectives by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1999 and the Center for Creative Photography (University of Arizona) in 2003.