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About Richard Estes
Born in 1932, Richard Estes is a leading artist associated with the Photorealism movement, which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s. Estes, along with Ralph Goings, Robert Bechtle, Audrey Flack and Chuck Close created works that sought to emulate the detail captured in photographs.
Estes graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956. He worked as a commercial artist in New York where he started using photographs to make illustrations for advertising campaigns. In 1968, Estes held his first solo, and highly successful, exhibition of paintings based on photographs he’d taken of New York.
As suggested in the term photorealism, Estes is a representational painter, who works from photographs to create highly detailed, hyper-real oil paintings and screenprints. He is known for works that bring to life seemingly ordinary, inanimate scenes of Manhattan. His repertoire of scenes expanded to include Paris, Florence and Chicago in the 1980s and the Maine coast in the 1990s.
In his process, Estes modifies images through changing angles and introducing complex reflections. The result is an uncannily familiar reality.
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