Gallery Min: Heinecken: Selected Works 1966-1986
Publisher: Tokyo: Gallery Min, 1986
Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Near Fine / No dust jacket as issued
Item #: 108581
$100.00
Specifics
First edition, first printing. Soft cover. Photographically illustrated wrappers; no dust jacket as issued. Photographs and multi-media works by Robert Heinecken. Text (in Japanese and English) by Mark Johnstone. Design by Hideyuki Taguchi. Unpaginated (76 pp.), with 29 four-color and 6 black and white illustrations printed in Japan by Graphic Arts Kobori. 11 x 11 inches. Published in conjunction with the 1986 exhibition "Robert Heinecken" at Gallery Min, Tokyo. Out of print. Scarce.
Condition
Near Fine (moderate surface wear and soiling; interior is Fine).
Description
About Robert Heinecken:
Robert Heinecken is one of the most innovative and influential artists of the second half of the 20th century. He was a pioneer of postmodern photographic practices, and his work anticipated the Pictures Generation artists of the 1970s and 1980s who practiced the appropriation of images from advertising and the media. A self-described “para-photographer,” Heinecken was always challenging the conventions of the then-accepted “canon” of photography. He transformed the possibilities of the medium, and had a profound impact on many photography-based artists who studied with him.
Influenced by Dada and Surrealism, especially Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and John Heartfield, Heinecken worked with numerous photographic techniques and materials, oftentimes combining them with various printmaking processes. In addition to offset lithography and etching, he made use of film transparencies, photographic emulsion on canvas, gelatin silver prints mounted to wood (e.g., "Multiple Solution Puzzle" Series), Polaroid materials, mixed media collage and photograms (e.g., ARE YOU REA and Recto/Verso Series).
His source materials included popular “lifestyle” magazines, advertising, images taken directly from television screens, pornography and news photographs. Through his ground-breaking works, Heinecken transformed American notions of consumerism, war, eroticism and mass media.
From Robert Heinecken (in the mid-1960s): "We constantly tend to misuse or misunderstand the term reality in reference to photographs. The photograph itself is the only thing that is real, that exists... (There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.)."
An excerpt from a text written by Carl Chiarenza (in 1976): "He uses existing photographs... and their reproductions because they have littered the world and our minds with unlimited examples of every conceivable image of truth, beauty, banality, eroticism, brutality, pornography, consumerism, political idea, personality, idol, and ideal. Indeed one is hard put to name anything that has not been replaced by a photographically derived image. His recycling of these images makes this astounding point before making any other. Heinecken knows the photograph is not real. He also knows that most of us still believe it is... The camera eye is lusty and insatiable, a perfect match for Heinecken's eye."
Robert Heinecken was born in 1931 in Denver, Colorado and in 1942 his family relocated to Riverside, California. After serving in the US Marine Corps, he earned a BA in 1959 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continued his studies, specializing in printmaking and graduating with an MFA in 1960. He founded the graduate program for photography at UCLA in 1964, where he taught until 1991. Heinecken died at age 74 in 2006 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
