Hyperrealism a n d Co n c e p t u a l A r t What you see is w h a t y o u g e t ?
Tal Danai Founder & President ArtLink Inc.
T h e H y p e r r e a l i s t Co n t e x t
In his enlightening paper on Realism and Hyperrealism Nicholas Oberly (2003) notes that: “The Oxford English Dictionary defines reality foremost as “the quality of being real or having an actual existence” and supplements this with a definition of real as “having objective existence,” and finally to exist as having “place in the domain of reality.” These conventional definitions of reality represent a larger problem in the attempt to locate the real on the most basic level, for they are wholly circular”. The plot thickens when one searches sources such as Wikipedia or Britannica for the term Hyperrealism. Wikipedia says: “Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is a fully-fledged school of art and can be considered as an advancement of Photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting photorealistic paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 2000s. The word Hyperealisme was created by Isy Brachot in 1973 as a French word meaning Photorealism. It was the title of a major catalog and exhibition at his gallery in Brussels Belgium in that year. Hyperealisme has been since used by European artists and dealers to apply to painters influenced by the Photorealists”. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, under Hyperrealism we find: “American art movement that began in the 1960s, taking photography as its inspiration. Photo-realist painters created highly illusionistic images that referred not to nature but to the reproduced image. Artists…attempted to reproduce what the camera could record. Several sculptors…were also associated with this movement. Like the painters, who relied on photographs, the sculptors cast from...