Richard Estes does not miss anything: Every detail, however tiny and seemingly insignificant, is caught by the artist’s sharp eye and factored into his photo-realistic paintings. His talent of hyper-realistically capturing reality and condensing it into unique perspectives makes him one of the most sought-after artists of our time.
(...) Continue readingRichard Estes – Studies in Chicago; illustration to earn a living
Richard Estes was born on 14 May 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois. His artistic career began in Chicago where he studied at a classical academy of fine arts. From the start, he was fascinated by the great painters of Realism, including Thomas Eakins, Edward Hopper and Edgar Degas. On graduating, he moved to New York where he worked as a graphic artist for an advertising agency and started transposing photographs into paintings in his spare time. In 1962, Richard Estes emigrated to Spain, and from 1966 was able to earn a living as a painter. Success came quickly, and in 1968 he held his first solo exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. In 1972 he was included amongst those artists who helped photo-realist art achieve its breakthrough at the fifth documenta n Kassel.
Hyperrealistic cityscapes without flaws
Richard Estes mostly uses photographs as templates for his hyperrealistic depictions. His early motifs came particularly from advertising, transposing billboards, posters and signs into his own pictorial compositions. From the beginning, he intentionally avoided iconic motifs, famous landmarks, much-publicised, unmistakable buildings, and landscapes. Despite this, Estes succeeded early on in capturing the everyday, the random and essentially ordinary into unique compositions and perspectives that led to his rapid growth in popularity with critics and the public, with the cityscape increasingly crystalising as the preferred motif. The method of painting from photographs led Estes to learn photography as well as acquiring knowledge of photomontage. While it is nearly always the New York district of Manhattan which inspires Estes’ glossy, deep depictions, in the 1990s he also produced images of the American East Coast.
Reality as artistic composition
Richard Estes shows reality in an almost unbelievably detailed manner, but he does not copy. He paints from photographs, but does not just repeat what is found in the pictures: he sets it all in motion, rearranges, and brings it to a standstill again on the canvas. The angle he takes for his paintings is barely possible for the human eye – it consists of condensations, reflections, and light reflexes, showing a living world in which there is no life: no people, no animals. Only rarely does the artist deviate from this rule. Although Richard Estes does not paint anything iconic, his pictures have long become icons themselves – a growing crowd of followers recognise at first glance when they are confronted by a work by the revered master, and even the critics of hyperrealism have to acknowledge that the artist has succeeded in finding his own pictorial language in the midst of greatest attention to detail.
Richard Estes lives and works in Maine and New York.
Richard Estes - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
