Richard Estes' Realism

About the Artist

Co-organized by the PMA and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, this exhibition is the most comprehensive survey since 1991 of the paintings of Richard Estes, the foremost practitioner of American photorealism who is renowned for his precise, crystalline style. Encompassing 50 works, the show spans from Estes' first mature New York City facades and scenes of the late 1960s to panoramic views of Manhattan and numerous other cities and natural sites. The exhibition offers new perspectives onto Estes as a painter both of the urban and natural worlds, balancing his interest in the dense fabric of New York and other large cities with his close attention to the coast of Maine and the woods of Mount Desert Island, where he has spent part of each year since the late 1970s. Select examples of Estes' rare portraits will also be included in the exhibition. This five-decade survey of his paintings reveals an artistic vision that is both deeply rooted in European and American art history, and consistently engaged with fundamental and contemporary questions of representation, form, and surface.