Hyperrealism
Hyperrealism is a movement in painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States and Europe as a development of Photorealism and a reaction against the dominance of abstraction and conceptualism. Its aesthetic rests on a scrupulous, almost obsessive reproduction of visible reality as mediated by photography: the artist deliberately works from the photograph as a source, transferring to the canvas not nature itself but its optical image. Its formal marks are extreme detail, a flawlessly smooth surface without any trace of brushwork, the precise rendering of highlights, reflections and the textures of glass, metal, chrome and skin, and often an enlarged scale and frontal composition. Unlike naïve illusionism, hyperrealism reflects on the very nature of the image in the age of media, emphasizing artificiality and the cold detachment of the camera's gaze. The movement's classics are Chuck Close with his monumental portraits, Richard Estes with his mirror-like urban storefronts, Robert Bechtle and Ralph Goings, and in sculpture Duane Hanson and John De Andrea with their startlingly lifelike human figures. Its contemporary phase, the hyperrealism of the twenty-first century, develops the body, skin and portrait with microscopic precision (Gottfried Helnwein and the sculptor Ron Mueck). The movement demands virtuoso technical mastery while posing a philosophical question about the boundary between reality and its copy, and about the truth of the image in a society saturated by photography and the screen.
