The Garden

Image: From The Garden, Published by Verri Media, May 8, 2020, (c) Erik Madigan Heck.

Photographer Erik Madigan Heck has released a short film, created by Nick Kennedy, introducing his new body of work The Garden. A travelling exhibition of The Garden will begin at The Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis and Christophe Guye Galerie in Zürich in September before moving to Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta and the Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto later in 2020.

The Garden film is narrated by Heck, discussing his ongoing series depicting his wife and two young sons in a variety of richly colourful surrounds. The photographs draw upon Catholic iconography and other mythic pictorial traditions to develop a colour-based narrative evocative of spiritual archetypes and the processes of dissolution and rebirth.

The description of the film explains: "The series moves through a singular world—a fairytale in which figures and settings become tableaux for hyper-concentrated tonal arrangements. Images are composited and oversaturated with colour to create painterly and surreal compositions in which the familiar and fantastic are merged. Completing its aesthetic fantasy through lavish clothes, gestures of dreamlike poignancy, and an Edenic environment, The Garden expresses the supramundane innocence and spontaneity that art makes possible—a life lived in the direct, immediate experience of beauty."

Image: From The Garden, Published by Verri Media, May 8, 2020, (c) Erik Madigan Heck.

Shot predominantly at the family's home in New England, the series initially elicits comparisons with other contemporary photography confronting family life, such as Sally Mann’s Immediate Family, or the work of Elinor Carucci. But though the subjects of Heck’s photographs are ostensibly his family, The Garden's real subject matter is colour and the aesthetic possibilities of photography to create what it captures.

We featured Heck’s photography of Mary Katrantzou’s spring / summer 2012 collection on the cover of Issue 45: Ingenuity and in an article by Beth Smith from the same issue.

For more information about Heck’s work visit maisondesprit.com