ERIK MADIGAN HECK
A Marriage: Photography + Painting
Erik Madigan Heck has mastered both the arts of photography and painting, his oeuvre existing in an intoxicatingly suspenseful sweet spot between the two. In a world dominated by a barrage of constant critical social commentary and opinion pieces, his art severs that usual intensity and instead offers something intriguing, nostalgic, and rooted in pure pleasure of the beautiful.
The 42-year-old was born and raised around Minneapolis, brought up on a diet of art culture by his parents, who towed him around to galleries and museums. Heck’s mother bought him his first camera when he was a teenager, inspiring him at a young age.
Photography was Heck’s first love and the focus of his MFA degree, although he has described himself as a “painter who uses photography.” Indeed, his photography serves as a love poem to painting, his images taking on a painterly effect in vivid color-driven splashes of light and vibrancy.
An expert manipulator of color and embracer of technology, Heck’s work interrogates any patterns of normalcy, his use of Photoshop evident throughout his photography. Although his foray into photography began with classic black and white imagery, the artist’s work has pushed further into the world of color, in recent years leaning toward primary pigments like striking yellows, blues, reds, and greens.
He’s photographed celebrities like Florence Pugh, John Malkovich, Adele, Tilda Swinton, and Taylor Swift, his craftsmanship defined by his trademark fusion between the world of fashion, nature, and color theory. In his work, the crisp edges of a marigold dress prove just as powerful as the blurred movement of a crimson flowering tree, the imagery all at once highly editorial and brilliantly nostalgic.
Beauty is at the crux of his work, his photography a persuasion of pure romanticism, draped in dreamy themes of memory. To delve into his world is to remember what it felt like to be a child watching adults existing in their world of poised movements and billowing clothing.
In one interview with Artful Living, Heck highlighted the force that pushes him to create with such beauty in mind, saying “Fashion is fashion — an object you put on your body. Food is food — nourishment for your body. Art, to me, has no purpose other than to exist for the sake of pure delight.”
