In the late 1960s, a group of artists emerged in the United States who painted scenes and objects from daily life with a high degree of realism, using photography as the basis for their works and achieving international recognition at Documenta in Kassel in 1972.
Hyperrealism is not a closed movement and today, more than forty years after it arose, many of the pioneering figures continue to be active while new artists deploy the photorealist technique in their creations. Artistic devices and motifs have evolved and changed over time but Hyperrealist works, with their incredible precision and degree of definition, continue to fascinate the public.
Organised by the Institut für Kulturaustausch (German Cultural Exchange Institute) and curated by its director, Otto Letze, this retrospective brings together 50 works from different museums and private collections. Having already been seen at the Kunsthalle in Tübingen (Germany), it now travels to the Museo Thyssen‐Bornemisza in Madrid where it will be on show until 9 June before moving on to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (UK).
From Celluloid to Oil, from Pixels to Acrylic
Photorealism in Hyperrealistic Painting
OTTO LETZE y NINA S. KNOLL
“(...) By the end of the nineteen‐sixties, the Photorealists, mainly working on the East and West Coasts of the United States, were seeking their own, independent form of artistic expression; in so doing, they were following a path pioneered by the Pop artists, who were primarily concerned with objectively representing the worlds of everyday life and consumer culture, as well as the mass media and advertising. Pop Art and Photorealism can thus be seen as a reaction to abstract painting. Common to both was a turn toward reality, of copying preexisting images, and, at least in part, the manipulation and use of photography. The Photorealists, however, developed this last idea further: their works were painted so precisely and with such detail that the paintings gave the impression of being photographs themselves. What was unique to these works was not only that they were based on photographic sources, but also that their form of reproduction, in the end, brought them back to photography. As a result, the pictures appear somewhat cold and inexpressive. «Unlike its predecessor Pop art, which was droll and witty and invited the viewer’s intellectual and emotional engagement, Photorealism held the viewer at arm’s length» (David M. Lubin). The critics’ outrage may be summed up as follows: Photorealism was not a form of art, but merely the virtuosity of copyists; it was only concerned with a precise, mimetic rendering of reality, which amounted to nothing more than producing a stereotyped image of it. They saw this artistic current as an anti‐intellectual, conservative, and reactionary phenomenon. The artists, however, never intended to compete with the detailed precision of the camera lens; rather, they were concerned with the technical problems of precisely rendering shades of colour, highlights, and reflections in order to create their own, new visual reality, one which bore less relation to the actual world than it did to a reproduced reality. By reproducing the image of a photograph in paint on a canvas, the Photorealists were indirectly questioning the claim of this type of image to be a faithful, immediate, and objective reproduction of reality. Since the mid‐sixties, the pioneers of Photorealism took this reproduced reality as their subject matter, both in how they painted and in what they painted, and artists today continue to engage with photography from this pictorial perspective.
There have been half a century of Photorealism, and three generations of Photorealists. While their subjects have, to some extent, changed, and developments can be seen both in the techniques of transferring images to canvas and in the way they are represented, the basic approach remains the same. This approach can be subdivided into five distinct steps: observing, seeing, photographing, selecting, and painting”.
Dates.- 22 March to 9 June 2013
Venue.- Museo Thyssen‐Bornemisza. Madrid. Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014 Madrid. Spain.
Curator.- Otto Letze. Director del Institut für Kulturaustausch.
Number of works.- 50
Organiser.- The Institut für Kulturaustausch ( German Cultural Exchange Institute ).
Coordination.- Blanca Uría; Curatorial Department, Museo Thyssen‐Bornemisza.
Venues and dates.- Tübingen, Kunsthalle, 8 December 2012 to 10 March 2013; Madrid, Museo Thyssen‐ Bornemisza, 22 March to 9 June 2013; Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 30 November 2013 to 30 March 2014.
