The merger of language and text is also central to Barbara Kruger’s large-scale black and white photographs, overlaid with provocative captions in bold Futura type. The title derived from the question ‘Are you Real?’ in one of the women’s magazines is used by Heinecken to highlight the subliminal messages propagated through mass visual imagery. Taken from more than 2000 magazine pages over a period of four years, this unique set of photograms, or ‘camera-less’ photographs, are direct contact prints of images culled from publication.
Doubletake photos series#
In Robert Heinecken’s series ”Are You Rea”, as for many of the artists featured in the exhibition, magazines are a principal source material. Each of the artists featured in the exhibition use photography as a tool to re-frame and re-contextualise, attributing new meaning to the way we see the world and our place in it. The exhibition takes as its starting point Robert Heinecken’s seminal series of photograms “Are You Rea” (1964-68), as well as works by leading artists of the Pictures Generation. Investigating the power of pictures in shaping ideas of identity, gender, race, desire and sexuality, the exhibition features works by: Anne Collier, Roe Ethridge, Robert Heinecken, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Collier Schorr, Steven Shearer and Hank Willis Thomas. The group exhibition “Double Take” at Skarstedt Gallery in London looks at the theme of appropriation and how it has been explored by different generations of artists using photography. Today, appropriating, remixing, and sampling images and media continue to challenge traditional notions of originality and test the boundaries of what it means to be an artist.
Pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, and Roy Lichtenstein reproduced, juxtaposed, or repeated mundane, everyday images from popular culture, both absorbing and acting as a mirror for the ideas, interactions, needs, desires, and cultural elements of the times. Appropriation took on new significance in mid-20th Century America and Britain with the rise of consumerism and the proliferation of popular images through mass media outlets from magazines to television.
0 kommentar(er)
