Collection: Photorealism

Photorealism emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and reached its public peak through the 1972 Documenta 5 exhibition at Kassel, where the curator Harald Szeemann grouped the new American painters with the wider international hyperrealist tendency under the heading Realismus. The dealer Louis K. Meisel coined the term Photorealism in 1969 and codified five defining criteria, requiring the use of the camera as primary information gatherer and the photograph as primary information source. The label is sometimes used interchangeably with Hyperrealism, though the latter usually designates the more recent and more saturated European variant from the 1970s onward.

The American core consisted of Chuck Close (1940–2021), Richard Estes (born 1932), Audrey Flack (1931–2024), Ralph Goings (1928–2016), Robert Bechtle (1932–2020), Richard McLean, John Salt, John Baeder, and Don Eddy. Close specialised in monumental head-and-shoulders portraits painted from photographic source images through grid systems, beginning with Big Self-Portrait (1968). Estes built the canonical idiom of New York street photography reflected in shop windows and chrome surfaces. Goings and Bechtle treated suburban diners, pickup trucks, and American highway subjects with the same impassive technical precision. Flack introduced colour, vanitas iconography, and overt subjectivity into the programme. The sculptural counterpart developed in parallel through Duane Hanson and John De Andrea, casting in fibreglass and polyester resin from living models.