HYPERREALISM
A WORDWIDE MOVEMENT
SYNOPSIS OF THE EXHIBITION / This component is in the process of evolving
The exhibition will not classify works by theme (the subject is artistic creation, not representation), nor by artist (it will not be a salon), nor by technique, nor even by country. The exhibition’s scenography will be mainly chronological and will highlight the evolution of an aesthetic inherited from photography towards an art of precision and framing up to the latest digital experiments.
The issue at stake goes beyond the simple history of painting the real, or drawing it, or sculpting it, for these artists who have been active over the last sixty years: it is the conditions of our vision of the world, for each of us as well as for society as a whole, that are in question.
So let us learn to see. On the large surface dedicated to this exhibition, all the possibilities of a generous scenography will be able to honour the artists (as well as the galleries which supported their work) who gave this movement its letters of nobility.
HYPERLATIVE REALISM BEFORE ITS TIME
(Copyright & All Rights Reserved: HYP’ART sas / Author & Art Critic: Christian ARTHAUD)
Foreword
To paint with the greatest effort of sharpness while seeking the maximum visual efficiency is as old as pictorial art itself. Did not Vermeer and Ingres achieve perfection? Which of the artists who have written the most memorable pages in the history of art have produced works whose hypertrophied realism can, in various ways, be seen as a precursor of Hyperrealism, if not Photorealism?
PHOTOREALISM IN THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE FROM 1965
(Copyright & All Rights Reserved: HYP’ART sas / Author & Art Critic: Christian ARTHAUD)
Foreword
» I would like to relive that moment when, in 1974, I was 18 years old and visited the exhibition « Conceptual Art and Hyperrealism: Ludwig Collection » held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. I remember, almost 50 years later, the tremendous impact that the paintings of Richard Estes, Don Eddy, Robert Bechtle, Ralph Goings or Chuck Close had on me and on the friends who accompanied me. I still remember Duane Hanson’s Bewery relicts (1969) as a cruel spotlight on an era that preferred to be psychedelic and ‘peace and love’. We can affirm that the history of art is an ever more pressing search to approach reality, toevict pretence, to confront reality as it is perceptible, even if it is only the fruit of our imagination. »
PHOTOREALISM AND HYPERREALISM IN THE WORLD (In progress)
