Richard Estes: My Camera Is My Sketchbook

"Richard is a living icon of American painting. While trends and movements come and go, Richard has stayed true to his vision and singular approach to painting for more than 50 years." — Damien Hirst

This summer, Schoelkopf Gallery presents Richard Estes: My Camera Is My Sketchbook, offering a revealing look into the practice of one of the leading figures in photorealist art.

The exhibition will focus on scenes from New York City and Maine, locations where Estes has lived, worked, and found inspiration for many years. Notably, this exhibition will present photographs by Estes as standalone artworks for the first time in the artist's career. Estes has taken photographs as reference material for decades, but in this exhibition, he presents photographs as artworks unto themselves for the first time.

The Schoelkopf Gallery exhibition follows recent notable institutional presentations of Estes' work including Richard Estes: Urban Landscapes at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine (2021), Richard Estes: Voyages at the Newport Street Gallery in London (2021), and Richard Estes: Painting New York City at the Museum of Art and Design in New York (2015). The artist's work is currently on view in the acclaimed group exhibition Rivaling Reality: 60 Years of Photorealism at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany through August 2.

At 94 years old, Richard Estes has created alluring pictures for over six decades. His unique approach to photorealism is not invested in strict accuracy, but rather strives to create compelling, constructed images. Estes uses his own photographs as source material, often combining multiple overlapping images into a single composition, which he then renders in paint. Patterson Sims, co-curator of the 2014–2015 touring museum exhibition Richard Estes' Realism, succinctly describes this process, saying: "Richard is an illusionist."

Estes was born in Kewanee, Illinois in 1932. His family moved to the suburbs of Chicago in 1947, and he went on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1950s. Early professional experiences at magazines and in the advertising industry shaped Estes' approach to image-making and introduced him to photography. In his early twenties, Estes travelled in Europe for several months before beginning his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. His enthusiasm for travel has continued to this day and informs much of the artist's work. Over the years, Estes has painted scenes from his journeys to Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and even Antarctica. 

Estes' practice is deeply entwined with place and the artist's firsthand experiences. He moved to New York in 1958 and has found endless inspiration in the city's dynamic urban environment ever since. In this exhibition, New York audiences will recognize works depicting familiar and iconic locations including the Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, Times Square, Penn Station, and Lincoln Center, among others.

In 1971, Estes began working with the Edition Domberger print studio in Stuttgart, Germany. This collaboration continued for over 20 years with Estes making frequent trips to Germany to oversee and contribute to the creation of his prints. This long and fruitful relationship with the print studio proved extremely generative, not only in producing a significant body of work in Estes' oeuvre, but also in the development of innovative new print techniques that pushed the screenprinting process to new heights in terms of size, precision, and complexity.

Jaime DeSimone, curator of the 2021 exhibition Richard Estes: Urban Landscapes at the Portland Museum of Art, notes in her catalog essay: "Although his prints may be lesser-known works, they rival his realist paintings in both complexity and subject matter." Furthermore, she explains how the precision of Estes' images lent itself to being translated into prints. "Screenprinting," she remarks, "achieves uniform and intense effects like no other printing process because of its ability to evenly print layers of inks and colors with various finishes (translucent, opaque, glossy, matte, etc.)."

A hallmark of Estes' compositions is his fascination with windows and other reflective surfaces in the urban environment. Many of the artist's pictures position the viewer in front of, or at an angle to, a pane of glass, such as a storefront or bus window. As seen in this exhibition in works like The L Train at 14th Street (2015), Crosstown Bus (2016), or Walgreens (c. 1980–1982), the images Estes creates becomes visual puzzles in which the glass reveals an interior space while simultaneously reflecting an exterior environment.

Estes' interest in the urban environment is further evident in his new photographs, which are being shown in this exhibition as discrete artworks for the first time in his career. The artist captured these images digitally and printed them himself. The photographs offer new perspective on quintessential New York City subjects that have inspired the artist for decades, such as glass facades, the subway, scaffolding, escalators, diners, storefronts, and skyscrapers.

"My camera is like my sketchbook really," Estes says. "In a way, showing these photographs is like revealing my process."

Estes' work is held in over 60 institutional collections around the world including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Gallery, London; Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, South Brisbane, Australia; and the Museo Botero, Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia, among others..

The Schoelkopf Gallery exhibition coincides with Richard Estes: Woods and Waters, on view at Dowling Walsh gallery in Rockland, Maine, July 3–August 1, 2026. 

Schoelkopf Gallery is the exclusive worldwide representative of Richard Estes.