Hyper-Realism 1967-2012

Organized by the Institut für Kulturaustausch (The Institute for Cultural Exchange in Germany) and curated by its director, Otto Letze, the traveling exhibition entitled Hyper-Realism 1967-2012 will be shown at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza until June 9 and then it will travel to the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in the UK. The exhibition arrived to Spain after being shown at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, in Germany.

The exhibition proposes for the first time in Spain a survey of the movement from its origins to present time. Never before had a retrospective of this magnitude been organized centered on the hyper-realist movement in Europe. The show consists of 66 works from several museums and private collections created by three generations of artists.

Part of the artwork comes from the first US artist that pioneered this movement during the decade of the 1960s; artists like Richard Estes, John Baeder, Robert Bechtle, Tom Blackwell and Chuck Close. These so called ″photorealists″ would use the photographic camera as the initial tool from which to transfer images to a canvas through increasingly more efficient techniques to achieve optical illusions interpreted by viewers as photo-like images. The early hyper-realist works represented pop scenes that involved automobiles, diners, Art Deco architecture, and all the iconography of stereotyped images that belonged to the world of kitsch.

Hyper-Realism reached its height at Documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), Germany. It was developed in response to research centered on perception and the manner in which photography changed our relationship with everything we regard as objective reality. Close-up images and panoramic scenes charged with certain theatricality standout in this type of representation. Thanks to advances in technology, the most recent hyper-realist production has achieved a degree of ″high-definition″ that is impressive because of its clarity.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalog (Spanish and English), published in a paperback version that includes writings by Linda Chase, Nina S. Knoll. Otto Letze, Louis K. Meisel and Uwe M. Schneede. These authors introduce us to the most incredible works by the protagonists of Hyper-realism, from the already mentioned initiators to contemporary representatives of the movement that work with digital techniques.