Hyperrealism

The tea timeOil on canvas, 90x140 cm (2015). Magda Torres Gurza.

Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture that resembles photography. Hyperrealism is considered an advancement of photorealism because of the methods used. The term applies to an independent art movement and style that emerged in the United States and Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The term hyperrealism is also applicable to sculpture and comics (Luis García, Alex Ross, etc).

History

Photorealism as a precursor to hyperrealism

In the 1920s, Precisionism painters already worked with the aid of faithfully reproduced photographs (as in the case of Charles Sheeler, both painter and photographer). But it is undeniable that Pop art remains the immediate precursor of hyperrealism, taking the iconography of the everyday, remaining faithful to the distance of its approach and producing the same neutral and static images.

The photorealists never formed a group, but they did hold exhibitions that presented them as a style: The Photographic Image and 22 Realistas, both in New York, in the middle of the sixties. At that time, abstraction was the dominant trend and realism was frowned upon; It was considered an art that copied from photographs or from reality and without any interest. However, artists such as Chuck Close or Richard Estes developed completely new techniques for representing reality, achieving sometimes astonishing results.

Other American artists in this vein include Don Eddy, John Salt, Ralph Goings, Robert Cottingham, John Kacere, Paul Staiger, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, and John de Andrea.

Like all photorealists, there are no traces of brushstrokes and the artist seems to be absent; the paintings are covered with a thin layer of paint, applied with a spray gun and brush, being scraped off if necessary, with a knife so that no relief remains, no matter. Added to this is the accuracy of the details. By using the painting in the process of reality, what is broken and manipulated twice (both in the painting and in the photograph), thus differentiating traditional realism from photorealism.

It is thanks to this type of art that Hyperrealism was born.

Hyperrealism

Current 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 the term "hyperrealism" to apply to the new movement and its splinter group of artists.

Graham Thompson wrote: "A demonstration of how photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called superrealism or hyperrealism and painters such as Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographs to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."

However, hyperrealism contrasts with the literal approach found in traditional photorealist paintings of the late 20th century. Hyperrealist painters and sculptors use photographic images as a reference source to create a more definitive and detailed representation, which is often, unlike photorealism, narrative and emotional in its depictions. Strict photorealist painters tended to mimic photographic images, omitting or abstracting certain finite details in order to maintain an overall consistent pictorial design. They often omitted human emotion, political value, and narrative elements. Evolving from Pop Art, the photorealistic style of painting was uniquely tight, precise, and sharply mechanical, with an emphasis on mundane, everyday imagery.

Hyperrealism, while photographic in essence, often involves a softer and much more complex approach to the depicted subject, 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. This is not to say that they are surreal, as illusion is a convincing representation of (simulated) reality. Textures, surfaces, lighting effects, and shadows appear lighter and lighter than the reference photo or even the subject itself.

Regarding American hyperrealist sculpture, we must highlight Duane Hanson, who reproduces life-size characters taken from the working classes, and Segal, who uses the same technique as Hanson: casting the models with plaster, filling the molds with fiberglass and polyester, assembly of the parts and painted in flesh colour; the piece is finished by dressing it with used clothes. John de Andrea sculpts nudes so hyperrealism that they look like real people, just as Nancy Graves does with her camel sculptures.

In the Spanish case, some of the most relevant hyperrealism figures would be the painters Antonio López, Eduardo Naranjo or Gregorio Palomo.

In the current art market, the most consolidated figures in terms of his career are the Chilean Claudio Bravo, who through his still lifes, drawings and, especially, his series of paintings on fabrics, packages and papers, has managed to reinvent hyperrealism, giving it an almost metaphysical condition; and the Argentine Enrique Sobisch, who lived and died in Madrid, whose works, of great artistic perfection, compete with the photographic snapshot.