Erik Madigan Heck’s new movie, The Garden, deals with the artist’s new eponymous series. Both the pictures and the movie will travel this Autumn, beginning with The Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Christophe Guye Galerie in Zürich in September and crossing the Atlantic to Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta and Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto.
The Garden depicts Heck’s family, his wife and two sons, in a colourful landscape, saturated to the extreme point. The photographer mostly finds inspiration in Catholic iconography. Colours evoke spiritual archetypes and processes of dissolution and rebirth.
The world described appears singular, like a fairytale in which characters and settings become paintings of their own, submerged by hyper-concentrated tones. Over-saturated with colours, images create pictorial and surrealist compositions in which the familiar and the fantastic merge. The Garden thus expresses a form of innocence and spontaneity where art makes possible a direct and immediate ontological experience of beauty.
The film was mostly shot in the family home in New England.
