Double Vision

Richard Heipp progresses the dialogue between painting and photography, exploiting mechanical processes to alter the viewer's visual and physical interactions with a painting. Although his paintings are manually produced, they begin as 35mm photographs or digital scans. They are at once pictorial illusions while also being interactive objects.

Richard Heipp progresses the dialogue between painting and photography, exploiting mechanical processes to alter the viewer’s visual and physical interactions with a painting. Although his paintings are manually produced, they begin as 35mm photographs or high resolution digital scans. They are at once pictorial illusions while also being interactive objects that force us to shift our viewpoints in order to better realize their physical and formal features.

For over 40 years, Richard Heipp has persistently explored the boundaries between mechanical reproduction and manual craftsmanship. As audiences continue to have progressively detached interactions with art through digital screens, Heipp’s paintings also reveal how our relationships with technology dictate, and often mislead, our interpretations of the 21st century. By using delusion to demystify illusion, Heipp recontextualizes what we know as photography and what we think we know of painting.