Women in their Environments in Erik Madigan Heck’s work.
By Irina Sheynfeld
Feb. 12, 2021
Perhaps Erik Madigan Heck (b.1983) is better known for his success in the world of fashion photography than for his depiction of enchanted, floating female figures in dreamscapes. These new works remind one of the paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and other representatives of Les Nabis, The Prophets, as they liked to call themselves, a group of young artists who were active in Paris from 1888 to1900. Heck’s latest series, The Garden, is now on display at the Jackson Fine Art gallery in Atlanta, GA. It will be on display until February 27, 2021. The Garden is a series of brilliantly colored, large-scale photographs that are simultaneously steeped in a glamor of fashion and poetry of fine art. In the statement accompanying the exhibit, Jackson Fine Art explains:
The Garden is an ongoing body of work depicting Heck’s wife and two young sons in a variety of richly colorful surroundings. The photographs draw upon Catholic iconography and other mythic pictorial traditions to develop a color-based narrative evocative of spiritual archetypes and the processes of dissolution and rebirth.(1)
In the manner of his Nabis predecessors, Heck dresses his muses in fantastical garments and places them in dreamscapes, pregnant with symbolism, from which they only barely emerge. Looking at Eniko in Flowers, from 2020, it is hard not to recall Édouard Vuillard’s Mother and Sister of the Artist, (1893), which is now on display at MoMA on the fifth floor. Similar to how Vuillard constructs a psychologically complicated space – his sister appears to be on the verge of disappearing into the wallpaper the way women in nineteenth-century France were expected to do – Eniko is dissolving into a decorative waterfall of flowers. Is Eniko an unintended metaphor for how easily and thoughtlessly contemporary women are abandoning their resistance to being objectified, a fight that has been left behind in time, unfinished, and almost forgotten? Or perhaps the depiction of women as beautiful objects is an inescapable legacy of Heck’s work as a fashion photographer.
Subtle foreboding saturates other works in the show as well. The Red Ball (2018) is large in scale and the brilliance of its palette can be appreciated only in person since that color range doesn’t completely translate on screen. The Red Ball depicts a woman in soft focus in a white billowing dress surrounded by a dark forest. Her small figure is bathed in an otherworldly moonlight that is coming from somewhere above and behind a dark hill. Deep shadows fall diagonally on the lush, saturated cobalt black forest clearing. The woman appears to be on the verge of an unknown threshold; she is overpowered by nature, and the feeling of sublime echoes The Monk by the Sea (1810), by German romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. The eponymous red ball can be found in the bottom left quadrant of the work, a surreal alien presence that serves as a humorous counterpoint to the pathos and drama of the photograph.
Similar to Vuillard, Heck is treating all the elements of his photographs, minimally retouched in Photoshop, as part of the whole and as equally important components. “I don’t do portraits,” Vuillard said. “I paint people in their surroundings.” (2) Only the pale faces of Heck’s subjects and especially their sensuous lips separate themselves from the harmonious whole; the scarlet mouths seem to be resisting the absorption into the overall entropy enveloping the work. In Untitled, 2019, the floating, fast-moving figure of the woman is engulfed in the waves of yellow blooms – it is only her vermilion lips that resist the tidal pool of the floral frenzy. The red spot of the mouth, like the red ball, is the anchor that bridges our world with Heck’s world of sublime dreams and fantasies.
The artist’s stunning book Old Future is on sale at Jackson Fine Art gallery. It was listed among the top ten photography books of 2017 by Vulture.
Bibliography
Cogeval, Guy. Édouard Vuillard (Washington : National Gallery of Art, 2003) 356
“Édouard Vuillard: MoMA.” The Museum of Modern Art. Accessed February 7, 2021. https://www.moma.org/artists/6194.
“Erik Madigan Heck: The Garden, November 13, 2020 - February 27, 2021.” Jackson Fine Art. Accessed February 7, 2021. https://www.jacksonfineart.com/exhibitions/195-erik-madigan-heck-the-garden/.
“Nabis – Art Term.” Tate. Accessed February 7, 2021. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/nabis.
Robinson, Maya, and Jesse David Fox. “The Best Photography Books of 2017.” Vulture. Vulture, December 20, 2017. https://www.vulture.com/2017/12/best-photography-books-of-2017.html.
Wender, Jessie. “Erik Madigan Heck: Fashion World.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, September 21, 2011. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/erik-madigan-heck-fashion-world.
[1] “Erik Madigan Heck: The Garden, November 13, 2020 - February 27, 2021,” Jackson Fine Art, accessed February 7, 2021, https://www.jacksonfineart.com/exhibitions/195-erik-madigan-heck-the-garden/.
[2] Guy Cogeval, Édouard Vuillard (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2003) 356