Superrealism

Superrealism. Style of painting (and to a lesser extent sculpture) popular from the late 1960s, particularly in the USA and Britain, in which subjects are depicted with a minute and impersonal exactitude of detail. Hyperrealism and Photographic Realism (or Photorealism) are alternative names, and some artists who practise the style do indeed work from photographs (sometimes using colour slides projected on the canvas); sharpness of detail is evenly distributed over the whole picture (except where out-of-focus effects in the photograph are faithfully recorded), but the scale is sometimes greatly enlarged. (Some critics prefer to use the terms ‘Photographic Realism’ or ‘Photorealism’ only when a picture has been painted direct from a photograph, but most are not so restrictive.) The immediate progenitor of Superrealism was Pop art; banal subject matter from the consumer society was common to both, and certain artists, such as Malcolm Morley and Mel Ramos, overlap both fields. The kind of humour found in Pop is very rare in Superrealism, however, which tends to be cool and impersonal, with subjects often chosen because they are technically challenging (involving multiple reflections, for example). Like Pop, Superrealism was a hit commercially, but it was less well received critically. Some critics, indeed, regard it as involving a great deal of painstaking work but very little else; others think that its exponents can achieve a strange kind of intensity, the effect of the indiscriminate attention to detail being—somewhat paradoxically—to create a strong feeling of unreality.

The leading American Superrealist painters include: Chuck Close, whose speciality is giant portrait heads; Don Eddy (1944– ), notable for scenes involving reflections in shop windows; Richard Estes (1936– ), most of whose work is devoted to the urban landscape; and Audrey Flack (1931– ), who is unusual in that she aims for emotional effect in her still-lifes of religious symbols and images of vanity and death. Philip Pearlstein is sometimes labelled a Superrealist but stands somewhat apart. British Superrealist painters include Graham Dean (1951– ), Michael English (1943– ), and Michael Leonard (1933– ), whose work includes highly detailed portrait drawings in a style mimicking the Old Masters. The best-known Superrealist sculptors have been the Americans John De Andrea and Duane Hanson, and more recently the Australian-born, British resident Ron Mueck (1958– ).

In the 1930s the term ‘Superrealism’ was fairly commonly used as an alternative to Surrealism, but this usage has died out.