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Richard Estes American (Evanston, Illinois, 1932 - ) View objects by this artist.

American painter, a leading proponent of photorealism, an extremely realistic painting style that emerged in the late 1960s. Although his paintings have the detailed precision of photography, Estes's distinctive, unpopulated urban landscapes are created with a painter's eye for composition, color, line, and form.

Estes was born in Evanston, Illinois. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1952 to 1956, later moving to New York City. Although his early paintings are figurative, he soon abandoned this style. Rather than working from preliminary sketches, as is traditional for painters, Estes began working from color photographs, combining several at once to create images more complex than could be mechanically recorded by a camera. A key early painting was Automat (1967, private collection), in which a square table, seen from a bird's-eye viewpoint, tilts against a rectangular floor pattern.

Estes had his first solo exhibit in New York City in 1968. The complexity of the artificial environment of New York City fascinated him, and he began to create images depicting city scenes through multiple reflections in glass and metal. His use of mechanical techniques and of banal subject matter were inspired by pop art, a movement of the 1950s and 1960s that represented images from popular and commercial culture with a deadpan sense of irony. Estes's painstaking, highly finished technique, however, belongs to a movement that originated in the early 1970s and is sometimes referred to as new realism. The new realists, who sought to objectively depict the everyday environment, included not only American photorealists such as Estes, Ralph Goings, and Audrey Flack, but also more diverse painters such as Americans Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein.

In the mid-1980s and 1990s, the human figure reappeared in Estes's work. He began to favor representations of the odd angles into which the urban environment forces its inhabitants, and representations of subways and buses, usually in the form of long shots of anonymous riders closely juxtaposed with a depiction of the view from their window, as in The Plaza (1991, Collection Louis K. Meisel, New York City).



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"Estes, Richard," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000
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