Robert Heinecken: Object Matter

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Robert Heinecken. _Figure Horizon #1_. Ten canvas panel with photographic emulsion, 11 13/16 x 11 13/16″ (30 x 30 cm) each. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange. © 2014 The Robert Heinecken Trust

Robert Heinecken. Figure Horizon #1. 1971

Canvas panels with photographic emulsion
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
© The Robert Heinecken Trust

Director, Glenn Lowry: Drew Sawyer.

Curator, Drew Sawyer: Figure Horizon #1 is part of a series that Heinecken produced beginning in the early 1970s using photographic emulsion on canvas or photo linen. He's exposing the canvas to a negative, so what he's done is extracted parts of a female nude and enlarged those and fragmented them.

There's two orientations for the work. One is a vertical grid in which there's two columns of five canvases. The other way is a horizontal orientation in which all ten are in a straight line. Heinecken didn't have one fixed orientation for his works; sort of similar to the photo sculptures and puzzle pieces in which this body is never exactly fixed.

Glenn Lowry: In their horizontal orientation the works from this series evoke horizons.

Drew Sawyer: Heinecken was well versed in the history of photography, and particularly in the American West. And the Figure Horizon works on this wall are related to that landscape tradition.