Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is considered an advancement of photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 1970s. [1] Carole Feuerman is the forerunner in the hyperrealism movement along with Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. [2] [3]
The art dealer Isy Brachot coined the French word hyperréalisme, meaning hyperrealism, as the title of a major exhibition and catalogue at his gallery in Brussels in 1973. The exhibition was dominated by such American photorealists as Ralph Goings, Chuck Close, Don Eddy, Robert Bechtle and Richard McLean; but it included such influential European artists as Domenico Gnoli, Gerhard Richter, Konrad Klapheck, and Roland Delcol . Since then, hyperealisme has been used by European artists and dealers to apply to painters influenced by the photorealists. Among contemporary European hyperrealist painters we find Gottfried Helnwein, Willem van Veldhuizen and Tjalf Sparnaay, Roger Wittevrongel, as well as the French Pierre Barraya, Jacques Bodin, Ronald Bowen, François Bricq, Gérard Schlosser, Jacques Monory, Bernard Rancillac, Gilles Aillaud and Gérard Fromanger. [4]
Early 21st century hyperrealism was founded on the aesthetic principles of photorealism. American painter Denis Peterson, whose pioneering works are universally viewed as an offshoot of photorealism, first used [5] "hyperrealism" to apply to the new movement and its splinter group of artists. [5] [6] [7] Graham Thompson wrote "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs." [5]
However, hyperrealism is contrasted with the literal approach found in traditional photorealist paintings of the late 20th century. [8] Hyperrealist painters and sculptors use photographic images as a reference source from which to create a more definitive and detailed rendering, one that often, unlike photorealism, is narrative and emotive in its depictions. Strict Photorealist painters tended to imitate photographic images, omitting or abstracting certain finite detail to maintain a consistent over-all pictorial design. [9] [10] They often omitted human emotion, political value, and narrative elements. Since it evolved from pop art, the photorealistic style of painting was uniquely tight, precise, and sharply mechanical with an emphasis on mundane, everyday imagery. [11]
Hyperrealism, although photographic in essence, often entails a softer, much more complex focus on the subject depicted, presenting it as a living, tangible object. These objects and scenes in hyperrealism paintings and sculptures are meticulously detailed to create the illusion of a reality not seen in the original photo. That is not to say they're surreal, as the illusion is a convincing depiction of (simulated) reality. Textures, surfaces, lighting effects, and shadows appear clearer and more distinct than the reference photo or even the actual subject itself. [12]
Hyperrealism has its roots in the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, "the simulation of something which never really existed." [13] As such, hyperrealists create a false reality, a convincing illusion based on a simulation of reality, the digital photograph. Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are an outgrowth of extremely high-resolution images produced by digital cameras and displayed on computers. As photorealism emulated analog photography, hyperrealism uses digital imagery and expands on it to create a new sense of reality. [5] [14] Hyperrealistic paintings and sculptures confront the viewer with the illusion of manipulated high-resolution images, though more meticulous. [15]
The hyperrealist style focuses much more of its emphasis on details and the subjects. Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are not strict interpretations of photographs, nor are they literal illustrations of a particular scene or subject. Instead, they use additional, often subtle, pictorial elements to create the illusion of a reality which in fact either does not exist or cannot be seen by the human eye. [16] Furthermore, they may incorporate emotional, social, cultural and political thematic elements as an extension of the painted visual illusion; a distinct departure from the older and considerably more literal school of photorealism. [17]
Hyperrealist painters and sculptors make allowances for some mechanical means of transferring images to the canvas or mold, including preliminary drawings or grisaille underpaintings and molds. Photographic slide projections or multi media projectors are used to project images onto canvases and rudimentary techniques such as gridding may also be used to ensure accuracy. [18] Sculptures utilize polyesters applied directly onto the human body or mold. Hyperrealism requires a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate a false reality. As such, hyperrealism incorporates and often capitalizes upon photographic limitations such as depth of field, perspective and range of focus. Anomalies found in digital images, such as fractalization, are also exploited to emphasize their digital origins by some hyperrealist painters, such as Chuck Close, Denis Peterson, Bert Monroy and Robert Bechtle. [19]
![La hora del te by Mexican painter Magda Torres Gurza [es] (oil on canvas, 90x140 cm). La hora del te.jpg](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/La_hora_del_te.jpg/220px-La_hora_del_te.jpg)
Subject matter ranges from portraits, figurative art, still life, landscapes, cityscapes and narrative scenes. The more recent hyperrealist style is much more literal than photorealism as to exact pictorial detail with an emphasis on social, cultural or political themes. This also is in stark contrast to the newer concurrent photorealism with its continued avoidance of photographic anomalies. Hyperrealist painters at once simulate and improve upon precise photographic images to produce optically convincing visual illusions of reality, often in a social or cultural context. [20] [21]
Some hyperrealists have exposed totalitarian regimes and third world military governments through their narrative depictions of the legacy of hatred and intolerance. [22] Denis Peterson and Gottfried Helnwein depicted political and cultural deviations of societal decadence in their work. Peterson's work [5] focused on diasporas, genocides and refugees. [23] Helnwein developed unconventionally narrative work that centered on past, present and future deviations of the holocaust. Provocative subjects include enigmatic imagery of genocides, their tragic aftermath and the ideological consequences. [24] [25] Thematically, these controversial hyperreal artists aggressively confronted the corrupted human condition through narrative paintings as a phenomenological medium. [26] These lifelike paintings are an historical commentary on the grotesque mistreatment of human beings. [27] [28]
Hyperreal paintings and sculptures further create a tangible solidity and physical presence through subtle lighting and shading effects. Shapes, forms and areas closest to the forefront of the image visually appear beyond the frontal plane of the canvas; and in the case of sculptures, details have more clarity than in nature. [29] Hyperrealistic images are typically 10 to 20 times the size of the original photographic reference source, yet retain an extremely high resolution in color, precision and detail. Many of the paintings are achieved with an airbrush, using acrylics, oils or a combination of both. Ron Mueck's lifelike sculptures are scaled much larger or smaller than life and finished in incredibly convincing detail through the meticulous use of polyester resins and multiple molds. Bert Monroy's digital images appear to be actual paintings taken from photographs, yet they are fully created on computers.
Hyperreality is a concept in post-structuralism that refers to the process of the evolution of notions of reality, leading to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of consensus reality. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used broadly to describe artworks in many different media, it is also used to refer to a specific art movement of American painters that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Ralph Goings was an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was best known for his highly detailed paintings of hamburger stands, pick-up trucks, and California banks, portrayed in a deliberately objective manner.
Don Eddy is a contemporary representational painter. He gained recognition in American art around 1970 amid a group of artists that critics and dealers identified as Photorealists or Hyperrealists, based on their work's high degree of verisimilitude and use of photography as a resource material. Critics such as Donald Kuspit have resisted such labels as superficially focused on obvious aspects of his painting while ignoring its specific sociological and conceptual bases, dialectical relationship to abstraction, and metaphysical investigations into perception and being; Kuspit wrote: "Eddy is a kind of an alchemist … [his] art transmutes the profane into the sacred—transcendentalizes the base things of everyday reality so that they seem like sacred mysteries." Eddy has worked in cycles, which treat various imagery from different formal and conceptual viewpoints, moving from detailed, formal images of automobile sections and storefront window displays in the 1970s to perceptually challenging mash-ups of still lifes and figurative/landscapes scenes in the 1980s to mysterious multi-panel paintings in his latter career. He lives in New York City with his wife, painter Leigh Behnke.
Audrey Lenora Flack was an American visual artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.
Denis Peterson is an American hyperrealist painter whose photorealist works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Tate Modern, Springville Museum of Art, Corcoran MPA, Museum of Modern Art CZ and Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York.
Robert Alan Bechtle was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. He lived nearly all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose art was centered on scenes from everyday local life. His paintings are in a Photorealist style and often depict automobiles.
Thomas Leo Blackwell was an American hyperrealist of the original first generation of Photorealists, represented by Louis K. Meisel Gallery. Blackwell is one of the Photorealists most associated with the style. He produced a significant body of work based on the motorcycle, as well as other vehicles including airplanes. In the 1980s, he also began to produce a body of work focused on storefront windows, replete with reflections and mannequins. By 2012, Blackwell had produced 153 Photorealist works.
A simulacrum is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god. By the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original. Literary critic Fredric Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, in which a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real thing. Other art forms that play with simulacra include trompe-l'œil, pop art, Italian neorealism, and French New Wave.
Robert Neffson is an American painter known for his photorealistic street scenes of various cities around the world, museum interiors and for early still lifes and figure paintings.
Carole A. Feuerman is an American sculptor and author renowned for her superrealist and hyperrealist art. She is recognized as one of the pioneering artists of the hyperrealist movement in the late 1970s and is best known for her figurative works of swimmers and dancers. Feuerman utilizes a variety of mediums including resin, marble, and bronze.
Howard Kanovitz was a pioneering painter in the Photorealist and Hyperrealist Movements, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the abstract art movement.
Gus Heinze is an American photorealist painter.
Robert Cottingham is an American artist known for his paintings and prints of urban American landscapes showing building facades, neon signs, movie marquees, railroad heralds and shop fronts.
John C. Kacere was an American painter. Originally an abstract expressionist, Kacere adopted a photorealist style in 1963. Nearly all of his photorealist paintings depict the midsection of the female body. He is considered one of the original photorealists, although he rejected the term.
Ron Kleemann was an American photorealist painter. Kleemann has been recognized as one of the original artists of the Photorealism movement. His work is usually that of shiny, brightly painted vehicles sometimes focusing on just certain parts.
Louis K. Meisel is an American author, art dealer and proponent of the photorealist art movement, having coined the term in 1969. He is also the owner of one of the earliest art galleries in SoHo at 141 Prince Street. In addition to Photorealism, Meisel is responsible for the resurgence of interest in the sub-set of American illustration identified as "Pin-up", and is the largest collector of original art of both genres. Louis and Susan Meisel own the largest collections of Photorealism and pin-up art in the world.
Roberto Bernardi is a photorealist painter who explores the beauty of everyday life though the reflections and transparencies in his still life paintings, using as his main subject plates and glasses, kitchens appliances, dishwashers, fridges and more recently lollypops and candies.
Yigal Ozeri is an Israeli artist based in New York City. He is known for large-scale cinematic portraits of young women in landscapes. As one of the leading Photorealism painters, his large-scale oil paintings tend to capture ethereal scenes of women in nature. His son is Adam Ozeri, a professional soccer player.
Cheryl Kelley is an American painter known for her photorealism, especially her paintings of classic and muscle cars. Her work has been featured on the cover of Harper's Magazine and can be seen at the Scott Richards Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco, California, the Bernarducci·Meisel Gallery in New York City, New York, and the Seven Bridges Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2009 and 2011 she was a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize, and in 2012 she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. The art collectors' resource Artsy considers her one of ten "Masters of Photorealism".
The dictionary definition of hyperrealism at Wiktionary
Media related to Hyperrealism at Wikimedia Commons
