Daniel Heidkamp “Amphora”

Pace Prints Chelsea

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Pace Prints presents Amphora, an exhibition of unique cut paper works by Daniel Heidkamp. This is the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery.

In Antiquity, the amphora was a storage vessel, used to carry goods, especially wine, across varying terrain and sea. Adopted by Heidkamp as a symbol for this body of work, Amphora bridges imagery from the Calanques region of Southern France to the dramatic domes and cliffs of Yosemite National Park. Contained in this metaphorical vessel are thoughts about sublime landscape, simultaneous yet divergent 20th century art movements, with colors influenced by and directly related to these natural settings.

Heidkamp’s Night Camps pay homage to the work of early American photographer Carleton Watkins, who brought a large-format stereoscopic camera into Yosemite Valley in 1860, creating some of the first images of the region. These highly detailed black and white images served as inspiration for countless artists over the decades, establishing a new uniquely American relationship to the landscape. At the same time, in the limestone hills and Calanques in Marseille, France, Paul Cézanne was beginning to establish a new way to see the landscape which would ultimately lay the groundwork for Cubism. Heidkamp’s The Torpilleur (Calanque de Sugiton) captures his own response to that landscape, where Cubist shapes seem to appear in the striation of the rocks and the blocky shadows under the bending pine trees. He says, “In both Yosemite and the Riviera, surreal, new colors burst forth throughout like in the aqua pools in sea caverns, with Neolithic markings, painted stripes on sailboats, or rainbows of waterfall spray clinging to granite bedrock.”

Amphora is the artist’s second project focused entirely on hand-cut collages. Heidkamp builds the surfaces of rugged French cliffs and American landscapes by layering richly pigmented Canson papers, originally produced in France beginning in 1557. Using every possible tone and tint in their gamut, he thinks of the options as his painter’s palette; their names, such as Bordeaux, Moonstone and Tobacco, take on a poetic imperative, representing the French landscape which first inspired them.

Heidkamp created this body of work in his Sunset Park, Brooklyn studio during the COVID-19 pandemic. He states “…[creating] in this time of quarantine can provide a space for the mind to travel when the body cannot. And I think looking to nature, looking to land, provides a sense of foundation and permanence when so much is uncertain.”