Hyperrealism and Photorealism

About

Photorealism emerged in the United States in the late 1960s. Rather than painting from life, artists projected or gridded photographs onto canvas and copied them exactly, reflections, blur and all. Richard Estes painted New York shopfronts whose plate glass mirrors the street, Robert Bechtle painted suburban driveways and family cars in flat California sun, and Chuck Close enlarged passport-like photographs into enormous heads such as Big Self-Portrait (1967–68). In Switzerland Franz Gertsch painted photographic scenes on a comparable scale.

Hyperrealism, a term taken up in Europe in the 1970s, often pushes detail beyond what a camera records. Sculptors joined in. Duane Hanson cast tourists, cleaners and shoppers in resin and dressed them in real clothes, and later Ron Mueck shifted scale with silicone figures down to the pores and hairs. Look closely for the telling flatness, or the overload of detail, that separates these works from the photographs they imitate.