ESTES, Richard (Kewanee, 1932)
Born in a small town of Illinois, Richard Estes studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1952 until 1956. During his training period, the artist admired the work of Edward Hopper in the Art Institute collection and mainly focused on traditional academic painting and drawing. Inmediately after Estes graduated he moved to New York where he initially started a career as a graphic designer working for a variety of illustrated publications. Continuing to feed his artistic inclinations, Estes kept training as an autodidact and eventually presented his first personal exhibition in 1968 at the Allan Stone Gallery. By the means of photographs used as a direct visual source, Estes specialised in pictorial snapshots of real-life landscapes. Nevertheless, his works conceal rather then reveal reality, for Estes ultimately selects scattered elements issued from multiple photographs and, by the means of his brush, he then recombines them according to his own taste. His optical illusions are particularly evident in works such as the 1976 Double Self-Portrait (New York, Museum of Modern Art) and in the 1980 Waverly Place (Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum) in which the wide-angled view strikes the logic of the beholder. Estes is today celebrated for his numerous series of urban cityscapes featuring building facades, shop-windows and fast-foods. His scenes are entirely devoid of the presence of human beings in whom the painter demonstrates no interest whatsoever. The clear and precise rendering of Estes’ streets views fully reveals his extraordinary artistic proficiency. Richard Estes, together with Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Duane Hanson are considered the principal founders and protagonists of the Photo-Realism movement.
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