Richard Estes: life and works

Richard Estes (born May 14, 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois) is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist motion of the late 1960s, with such painters as John Baeder, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, and Duane Hanson. Author Graham Thompson writes “One demonstration of the exaggeration photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and to come 1970s. It is also known as super-realism or hyper-realism and painters when Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs.”