Erik Madigan Heck: Before One Assembles Itself

For Erik Madigan Heck, taking the photograph is often only the beginning.

Heck has frequently described himself as “a painter who uses photography.” The idea goes back much further than his career as a photographer. Growing up in Minnesota, he was introduced to art through his mother, who was a painter. He began painting himself as a child and continues to paint alongside his photographic practice today. When he received his first camera at the age of fourteen, photography became his primary tool, but painting remained the foundation for how he thought about making an image.

That distinction is important. Heck is not particularly interested in photography as a way of simply recording what is in front of the camera. Much of the actual creation happens afterwards.

“Most of the creation of the photograph comes after the initial negative is taken, in terms of layering color on top of itself, over many layers, sometimes up to a hundred layers of color, to flatten space, eliminate shadows, and saturate color beyond a place of being recognizable to the original photograph that was taken,” says Erik Madigan Heck.

He rarely changes the physical objects within the original frame. Instead, it is colour that changes the world around them. The photograph remains underneath, but through layer after layer, the image moves further away from the reality the camera originally recorded.

For Heck, this is also where the distinction between photography and painting becomes useful. Historically, he argues, photography has been expected to document a situation or a period in time, while painting has had the freedom to explore dreams and invent scenes from the mind.

“My photographs ultimately function as the latter, rather than the former. And so, it has always felt more appropriate to describe them as such, even if they begin with taking a picture with a camera,” continues Heck.

Beyond the photograph

Heck’s practice extends beyond photography into painting, writing, film, typography, music and book-making. His work has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, alongside commissions across art, culture and fashion. But neither photography nor fashion fully explains what drives the work.

When asked what has driven his work throughout his career, Heck does not point to a particular aesthetic or even a single idea. Instead, he describes questions that continue to change from one project to another.

“At the core of my work have always been philosophical questions about humanity in relation to the world at large. Questions of theology, even though I’d describe myself as a non-believer, metaphysics, and more general philosophical questions about where we are now as a species and how art might help us understand each other,” Heck says.

The necessity of beauty

That answer offers another way into Before One Assembles Itself. Beauty and colour have long occupied a central place in Heck's work, but for him they are not simply questions of aesthetics. He has previously described colour as the element that allows an image to cross from the real world into an imagined one. 

For Heck, experiencing beauty has a purpose:

“I feel like experiencing beauty now is a necessity as it reminds us all that there is still hope for us to progress away from only bad decisions in our politics, the way we treat the environment, and how we treat each other.”

For his first public exhibition in Sweden and the Nordic region, that idea also shapes what he hopes happens when the work finally meets its audience.

“I would hope they take away joy, and a sense of hopefulness and wonder from my work, especially at a time that feels very dark politically, and in general with the news,” Heck says.

Before One Assembles Itself brings these different parts of Heck's practice together: the photograph as a starting point, painting as a way of thinking, colour as a tool for transforming what the camera records, and the larger questions that continue to drive the work.

Erik Madigan Heck: Before One Assembles Itself
House of Photography, Stockholm
Opens August 26, 2026