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Hyperréalisms Richard Artschwager, Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, George Deem, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, Maxwell Hendler, David Kessler, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, Joseph Raffael, John Salt, Ben Schonzeit Strasbourg Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery (Musée
d'Art Moderne et Contemporain |
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The Museums of Strasbourg Head
of the Museums Exhibition organizer Jean-Claude Lebensztejn Patrick
Javault Tel
: 03.88.23.31.31 Opening times: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day except: Thursday:
12 noon to 10 p.m. Communications
Department 2
place du Château Tel.
00 (0)3 88 52 50 15 |
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Hyperrealisms – USA, 1965-1975 is undoubtedly the first exhibition to consider historically and to its full extent an artistic phenomenon that was in the forefront of the art scene at the beginning of the 1970s. A collection of about seventy paintings and sculptures by the leading actors – Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Richard Estes and many more – rarely or never shown in Europe, presents hyperrealism in all its complexity and different aspects (hence the use of the plural in our title). The decade that marked its emergence, its peak and its decline deserves a major reassessment. Long considered as a purely reactionary phenomenon, hyperrealism offers a radical challenge to the canons of artistic modernity, which links it to a certain number of contemporary phenomena (minimal art, conceptual art etc.), with many ramifications and paradoxes: copying is assigned a provocative role; a reduction in visual representation (pictures of pictures); active reflection on the meaning of motif and picture; home-made reproduction of mechanical production, along with many other aspects. A room dedicated to the current works of the artists invited gives an outline of their evolution, which is often different but always logical. It shows all the more clearly the complexity of a movement that we are sometimes too inclined to give a false identity. The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of films, looking into new issues to which each and every viewer can try to give his or her own answers. A catalogue comprising in-depth studies and long previously unpublished interviews with several artists (Morley, Close, Raffael, Schonzeit, Eddy and Estes), gives the full measure of a phenomenon that it is high time, three decades later, to reconsider in a new light. Just like any study or exhibition, Hyperrealisms – USA, 1965-1975 demonstrates, but in a more determined and explicit way than usual, that the history of art is being rewritten all the time. This catalogue will include the texts of Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Richard Shiff, Akira Lippit, Fabrice Hergott and Patrick Javault Jean-Claude Lebensztejn is an art historian, a former professor at the university of Paris I. He has written about Malcolm Morley, Pontormo, Seurat, Cézanne and the music of cats. |