Richard Estes: The Art Show, Booth A27

Richard Estes is the standard-bearer of Photorealist painting and its most devoted and accomplished practitioner. Born in 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois, Estes began his artistic career in high school before receiving a BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956. In 1966, he began painting full time in New York and became a founder of Photorealism, which abandoned the visible hand of the artist for a hyperrealist approach to painting inspired by photographic precision. Estes extensively photographed New York and other destinations throughout his travels and used these images as the basis for many of his painted compositions, but his final paintings are amalgamations of his documented environment rather than exact replicas. Estes earned his first solo exhibition in 1968 at Allan Stone Gallery in New York and has since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and globally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Toledo Museum of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1978); Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo, Kinetsu Museum of Art, Osaka, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (1990); and recently Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2007), and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2014). Estesʼ work is held in the collections of leading international institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, among many others. Estes currently lives and works in Maine and New York.