Curated by Eva Respini and Drew Sawyer
With the revived currency of appropriation in contemporary art, the work of Robert Heinecken is once again undergoing reassessment. Arriving eight years after his death in 2006, MoMA’s survey of the artist’s photography-based practice is the largest since his retrospective in 1999 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. “Object Matter” includes approximately 140 works from the early 1960s to the late ’90s—the breadth of the LA artist’s darkroom experimentations and extensions of the photographic medium into sculpture, painting, printmaking, collage, and installation. Heinecken’s ironic humor and the important questions his conceptualism asks in its adoption of mass-media (including pornographic) imagery are themes taken up as well in the show’s comprehensive catalogue. Even those familiar with the art of this restless “para-photographer” may now come to see his focus on the human body—deemed retrograde in the ’80s—as altogether prescient. Travels to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Oct. 5, 2014–Jan. 17, 2015.
