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A broad range of technical approaches and a knife-sharp wit have been hallmarks of Robert Heinecken’s art for three decades. His work is a deliberate conflation of sex, violence and commerce; its effect is to reveal our society’s inability to keep straight the differences between such interactions.

Figure Sections/Beach, 1966, is typical of Heinecken’s earliest mature work. It simultaneously embraces the photograph’s analogy to the real and disavows photography’s limitations. Such work so intrigued some Los Angeles artists of the late 1960s and 1970s that Heinecken found himself at the center of a movement which saw national exposure for the first time in the important traveling exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, organized in 1970 by the Museum of Modern Art.

After 1970 the face of photography as a separate art practice changed radically, largely in response to the work of Heinecken and the many artists he influenced.