Oct 22 2014 - Nov 25 2014
The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by the American master, Richard Estes. The exhibiton, entitled Recent Paintings, will open on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014. It will be comprised of twenty oils painted over the past two years. The exhibition represents an important moment in the career of the artist, as the most comprehensive retrospective exhibition on his work, Estes’ Realism, organized by The Portland Museum of Art in Maine and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., is currently underway and will continue through February of 2015.
Richard Estes is widely considered to be the pioneer and master of American Photorealism. Beyond the discipline of attaining an uncanny sense of verisimilitude, Estes accomplishes a profound reinvention of the image. The renowned cityscapes of the artist, works such as 79th Street Bus Stop, 2013, are often constituted by a complex system of intertwined perspectives that are achieved through the use of reflection and refraction, a characteristic aspect of his work. This system of perspectives, along with a distinct usage of cropping, distills the artist’s gesture and sense of invention. Much of the faint reflection seen through translucent glass cannot be attributed to the photographic image per se, but to the aesthetic discretion of the artist. These are surfaces characterized by striking values, an altogether tonal richness that engenders a magnetic presence.