Description:
view from the exterior of an office building showing interior escalator
Label Text:
A matrix of cool and neutral building materials, Richard Estes' Manhattan is a triumph of photorealism. Despite the artist's loyalty to the Photorealist movement (he was one of its foremost proponents at the movement's inception in the 1960s), the mechanical ordering of the building borders on abstraction, particularly in the layering of images and reflections. The tiny pink dots of human heads, the monstrous escalator, and the almost prehistoric silhouette of the plants in the foreground work together to create an image that is about material and size, pattern and object. In Estes' work we can see the joining of Hopper's secluded spaces and Marin's relentless force-the building is both lonely and huge, both forceful and contained-a veritable Frankenstein of the built environment. Throughout his career Estes has maintained almost exclusive loyalty to New York, depicting the city as highly finished, sharply detailed, and often devoid of people and all well-known landmarks. However, Estes' realism is slippery and deceptive-he paints from photographs of his subject that he then arranges to recreate reality. The result is a sort of hyperrealism, a painting that records with great intensity and depth what the camera saw and illustrates Estes' controlling artistic eye and technical skill.
Subjects:
Cotton; screen prints; Silk Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1982.32.3 |
