- 141
Robert Heinecken
Description
- Robert Heinecken
- Upper Middle Class Nuclear Family
- polaroid polacolor prints
- Various sizes to 82 by 34 5/8 in. (208.3 by 87.9 cm.)
Provenance
Sotheby's New York, Photographs from the Polaroid Collection, 21-22 June 2010, Sale 8649, Lot 35
Exhibited
Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection, November 2002–January 2003
Literature
Catalogue Note
In 1988, Heinecken received a Polaroid Corporation grant to use the massive 40-by-80-inch Polaroid camera at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a device developed initially to copy paintings. The camera, measuring 12-foot-by-12-foot and 16-foot high, was ideal for the large scale of Heinecken’s Upper Middle Class Nuclear Family collage, which measures approximately 7-foot by 11-foot. As an artist for whom the re-appropriation of images is a central theme (see Lot 142), Heinecken utilized Polaroid technology not only to document Upper Middle Class Nuclear Family, but also to create an entirely new work that further comments on contemporary society’s gross consumer culture.
The original relief collage of Upper Middle Class Nuclear Family is in the collection of the Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago.