Robert Heinecken: Copywork

Heinecken, Robert; Kevin D. Moore (text). Robert Heinecken: Copywork. London: Ridinghouse, 2012. First edition. Quarto (9¾” x 12¼”), 192pp. Photo-illustrated boards, white lettering on front cover and spine. Slight wear on fron corners, otherwise a fine copy.

Copywork will feature a full portfolio of one of the artist’s best-known works: the Are You Rea series (1964-1968). This series began as photograms of magazines and newspapers that were subsequently made into gelatin silver prints, and finally became an edition of lithographs. Are You Rea demonstrates Heinecken’s obsessive urge to process the same images in a multitude of ways, and directly addresses the artist’s affinity with Dadaism and Surrealism. The word real in an advertisement becomes the truncated rea in the photogram, and is intentionally pronounced ray to reference Man Ray’s rayographs. Each lithograph is revelatory in its juxtapositions of both copy and imagery from American advertising, exposing the mass media’s role in subconscious suggestion and promotion of capitalist consumption (sex, food, physical beauty). Heinecken considered pictures to represent manufactured experience, and wanted to expose the complicity in seemingly casual, everyday media imagery. In addition to Are You Rea, the exhibition will showcase two iconic Polaroid works: Tuxedo Striptease (1984) and a selection from Heinecken’s Lessons in Posing series (1981-1982). Also on view will be lithographic film works, magazines, inkjet print reliefs, and standing figures and cut outs, terms that Heinecken employed to identify his life-size collaged figures of women, men, objects and animals juxtaposed into uncanny relationships. Fine. Hardcover. (54692) $45