The Believable Lie: Heinecken, Polke, and Feldmann on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art

CLEVELAND (July 23, 2014) – The Cleveland Museum of Art presents The Believable Lie: Heinecken, Polke, and Feldmann, an exhibition focusing on relationships among the photographic work of three artists active during the 1970s that drew on ideas of surrealist/Dada culture of the 1920s and 1930s and influenced succeeding generations of photographers and media artists. The artists— Robert Heinecken, Sigmar Polke and Hans-Peter Feldmann— hail from different backgrounds: two Germans and one Los Angeles native who all matured in the decades following World War II. The exhibition is on view now through November 30, 2014 in the museum’s Photography Galleries.

A corrective to the egocentric model of the 1950s artist was due; hence the photograph, pervasive and democratic in its accessibility, became a lightning rod for artists seeking new forms of expression. The Vietnam era provoked a certain skepticism toward the media by artists in America and Europe that extended into a prolonged investigation of the photograph as truth, questioning its documentary nature. The barrage of popular imagery – from lush magazines to color television – became fodder for work aimed at exposing the cultural hegemony. As a time marked by underground political dissent, the 1970s was a decade when artists began working small, working privately and working beyond the boundaries of commercial gallery system.

“Although the three artists each have significant exhibition histories, this is the first exhibition to bring their photographic work together, shedding light on the iconographic and formal choices they made when photography ascended into the contemporary art arena,” said Lisa Kurzner, The Believable Lie guest curator. “Each embraced photography as one element of an artistic practice guided as much by literature, philosophy and an attention to popular culture as by classical formal concerns of the medium. Yet, photographic process and context remained important to them.”

Appropriation, collage, serial narrative, the elevation of the anonymous photograph: each artist explored these concepts in increasingly sophisticated work throughout the decade. Strategies that emerged earlier in the circles of the surrealists and New Vision photographers – the untutored “photographic mistake,” photography as a form of literary pointing – adopted by the artists in this exhibition have subsequently been absorbed by the contemporary generation using photography as conceptual art, from Gabriel Orozco to Hank Willis Thomas.

Related Programming
Curator’s Talk: Lisa Kurzner
Saturday, September 13, 2:00 p.m., Recital Hall. FREE.
This exhibition explores the beginning of photography’s appreciation as conceptual art arena during the 1970s in the work of three pioneers—Robert Heinecken, Sigmar Polke and Hans-Peter Feldmann—who synthesized aspects of Dada and surrealism of the 1920s and ‘30s in highly experimental work which laid the groundwork for photographic artists of the Pictures Generation of the 1980s and beyond. Kurzner will examine works from the show, many exhibited for the first time together in a museum context, against the backdrop of the social and political turbulence of the 1960s in America and Europe. She will explore each artist’s understanding of photographic modernism in content and photographic technique, as well as the relevance of each to the most innovative conceptual photographic work being made today.