Richard ESTES (1932)

At roughly the same time as the emergence on the American scene of Pop art, with its appropriation of the codes of a ravenously consumerist society, a number of their fellow countrymen started

A new record for Post-War & Contemporary Art sales has been set.If we just take Christie’s and Sotheby’s prestige sales of 8 and 9 May 2012, the 102 masterpieces sold generated roughly $578.3 million in revenue and 18 new artist’s records.

Hyperrealism, which emerged in the USA in the 60s, inherits its attachment to a banal everyday version of reality from Pop art. The artists draw their subjects from real life; but it is a “second-hand” real life, because they do not create their works directly in front of the person or thing they are depicting, but from photographs. They demonstrate a great, often laborious, technical virtuosity, to transcribe a reality that has been examined under a microscope.