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Photorealist Paintings

PHOTOREALISM

A direct challenge to Abstract Expressionism’s subjectivity and gestural vigor, Photorealism was informed by the Pop predilection for representational imagery, popular iconography and tools, like projectors and airbrushes, borrowed from the worlds of commercial art and design.

Whether gritty or gleaming, the subject matter favored by Photorealists is instantly, if vaguely, familiar. It’s the stuff of yellowing snapshots and fugitive memories. The bland and the garish alike flicker between crystal-clear reality and dreamy illusion, inviting the viewer to contemplate a single moment rather than igniting a story.

The virtues of the “photo” in Photorealist art — infused as they are with dazzling qualities that are easily blurred in reproduction — are as elusive as they are allusive. “Much Photorealist painting has the vacuity of proportion and intent of an idiot-savant, long on look and short on personal timbre,” John Arthur wrote (rather admiringly) in the catalogue essay for Realism/Photorealism, a 1980 exhibition at the Philbrook Museum of Art, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At its best, Photorealism is a perpetually paused tug-of-war between the sacred and the profane, the general and the specific, the record and the object.

Robert Bechtle invented Photorealism, in 1963,” says veteran art dealer Louis Meisel. “He took a picture of himself in the mirror with the car outside and then painted it. That was the first one.”

The meaning of the term, which began for Meisel as “a superficial way of defining and promoting a group of painters,” evolved with time, and the core group of Photorealists slowly expanded to include younger artists who traded Rolleiflexes for 60-megapixel cameras, using advanced digital technology to create paintings that transcend the detail of conventional photographs.

On 1stDibs, the collection of Photorealist art includes work by Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, Charles Bell and others.

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Style: Photorealist
Artist: Lucia Bergamini
SIMPSON, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
DETAILS: Oil on canvas, size 16x48x1.5 inches - 40X120X4 cm - sides are painted to match the painting SUPPORT: gallery canvas, wrapped around the sides and stapled to the back SIGN...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

CAPOLAGO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
DETAILS: Oil on canvas, size 28X40X1.5 inches - 70X100X4 cm - Sides are painted to match the painting SUPPORT: gallery canvas, wrapped around the sides and stapled to the back SIGN...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

L'ORIGINE DELLA VITA, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
DETAILS: Oil on canvas, size 20x40x1.5 inches - 50x100x4 cm - Sides are painted to match the painting SUPPORT: gallery canvas, wrapped around the sides and stapled to the back SIGN...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

CROCCANTINO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
DETAILS: Oil on canvas, size 28x40x1.5 inches - 70X100X4 cm - sides are painted to match the painting SUPPORT: gallery canvas, wrapped around the sides and stapled to the back SI...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

SEGUIMI, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
DETAILS: Oil on canvas, size 20x40x1.5 inches - 50x100x4 cm - Sides are painted to match the painting SUPPORT: gallery canvas, wrapped around the sides and stapled to the back SI...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

AROMATICO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
DETAILS: Oil on canvas, size 20x40x1.5 inches - 50x100x4 cm - Sides are painted to match the painting SUPPORT: gallery canvas, wrapped around the sides and stapled to the back SIGN...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

DOCCIA FRESCA, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
Oil on canvas :: Painting :: Photorealism :: This piece comes with an official certificate of authenticity signed by the artist :: Ready to Hang: No :: Signed: Yes :: Signature Locat...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

SOLE, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
This painting is a sun, when you stay in the same room with its is like to feel the heat as if you take the sun! :: Painting :: Photorealism :: This piece comes with an official cert...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

SPUNTINO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
I have been inspired to this work because it is the sun for me, this light and the energy that emanates is bursting.. A really tonic for your eyes. As always I used oil on canvas and only use primary colours, which I mix to obtain all of the shades that I need. It creates deeper and more brilliant colours. I use Rembrandt oil...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

BUONGUSTO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
Oil on canvas The pasta taste, one of my favorite subjects and courses I chose this topic for its ability to arouse the emotion I feel in those moments before the wonderful flavor o...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

MARTE, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
This painting make me serene and calm, its sweet colours and shades are a caress to the spirit, while the dynamism of the wine in this masculine form (hence the name Marte) gives a n...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

ME TE MAGNO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
Oil on canvas This painting inspired me for its cheerfulness and its laughter, it is for me a really antidepressant! :: Painting :: Photorealism :: This piece comes with an official...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

PARZIALMENTE SCREMATO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
What I love about this painting is the simplicity given by the two colors that compose it with all their nuances, I find that this simplicity is very relaxing and invigorating for th...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

SAN GIOVANNI, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
Oil on canvas, size 28x40x1.5 in This painting is very important for me because this plate was made by a very special chef in Asti. His speciality is the typical plates from Piedmon...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

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Caviar
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Strawberries, Gyula Bubarnik, Oil Paint/panel, Photorealist
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Manon Cleary "Rat"
Located in Washington, DC
Photorealist oil painting by Manon Cleary (1942-2011). Painting is signed on reverse "Cleary". Painting is stretched on aluminum stretcher and dates to the 1990s. Manon Cleary had a remarkable ability to draw and paint with photographic fidelity, but she was also known as a charismatic teacher at the University of the District of Columbia and as a free spirit whose exuberant life may have been her most enduring work of art. Since the 1970s, Ms. Cleary had been at the center of a group of artists in Adams Morgan. She exhibited her meticulous artwork throughout the city and around the world, but she also became known for her striking presence, her colorful love life and the rats she kept as pets. As an artist, Ms. Cleary borrowed classical techniques from her deep study of Renaissance masters to create paintings and drawings memorable for their frank realism and sometimes disturbing themes. In addition to her many nude self-portraits, Ms. Cleary made erotically charged paintings of flowers. She took inspiration from a painful personal history in a series of works depicting the terror of rape and, in later years, of not being able to breathe without mechanical assistance. Critics considered her a leading figurative artist of the photo-realist school, in which painters render their subjects with camera-like precision. In fact, Ms. Cleary occasionally won awards for photography when adjudicators didn’t realize her works were free-hand creations. She was “widely acknowledged to be among the best, if not the best, of the city’s figurative painters,” Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan wrote in 2006. “There is a tension between the cool, clinical detachment of photography and painting’s warm idealization of form.” Ms. Cleary exhibited her art in galleries and museums from Moscow to Paris to Hickory, N.C., but Washington was her home for the past 42 years. In 1974, she settled in the decrepit Beverly Court apartments on Columbia Road NW, where a coterie of artists soon grew up around her. She painted her walls purple, and her fourth-floor apartment — even with the pet rats — became something of a bohemian salon. “She was a star,” painter Judy Jashinsky told the Washington City Paper in 2004. “She was stunning, beautiful; long, brownish–black hair; real thin; wore . . . little sundresses and sandals. She was just very cool, and there was always a crowd around her.” Ms. Cleary had a long list of male admirers, including several whose confrontational attempts at “performance art” led to their arrests. She had a brief marriage in 1981 to a Danish artist known as Tommy — “just Tommy,” Ms. Cleary said — whom she divorced in less than a year. As a kind of graphic homage to her various lovers, Ms. Cleary made a series of intimately revealing portraits that were featured years later on the HBO program “Real Sex.” She met her second husband after a gallery opening in Baltimore. By way of introduction, Kijek, a dancer, stripped naked at a crowded party, walked up to Ms. Cleary and said, “Wouldn’t you like me to pose for you?” They were married in 2001. In spite of her unconventional life, Ms. Cleary was more than a mere provocateur. After a day of teaching at UDC, she would return to her studio, with its windows painted over to block out sunlight, and work late into the night, with a bottle of Dr Pepper at her side. She took nude photographs of herself from every angle, then painstakingly created lifelike images that seemed alive with the warmth of human flesh. After studying in Rome in her youth, she developed what she called “an obsession” with Caravaggio, an iconoclastic painter who lived from 1573 to 1610. She often copied paintings at the National Gallery of Art and, in her own work, blended Renaissance styles with a distinctly modern sensibility. Manon Catherine Cleary was born Nov. 14, 1942, in St. Louis. Her father was a doctor, and her identical twin sister, Shirley Cleary-Cooper, is an artist in Helena, Mont. She was a 1964 graduate of Washington University in her home town and, for the rest of her life, was proud of having been a member of the Pi Phi...
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1990s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil, Canvas

Previously Available Items
FUOCO VIVO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
DETAILS: Oil on canvas, size 20x40x1.5 inches - 50x100x4 cm - Sides are painted to match the painting SUPPORT: gallery canvas, wrapped around the sides and stapled to the back SIGN...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

FIORE D'INVERNO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
This composition has been created by precious products; the breadsticks are my favourite, with hazelnuts, and the eggs are make by my chicken!! I love this painting because of the l...
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21st Century and Contemporary Photorealist Paintings

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Oil

PASSIONALE, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
In this painting the pop / comic vein that characterizes my canvas shines through, a "MARVEL" touch to a hyper-realistic wine. The painting will be delivered with its Certificate of...
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21st Century and Contemporary Photorealist Paintings

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Oil

VOLO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
I love these series of paintings, they make me calm and peace. Waiting the painting to dry, I placed it near VELA, and I realized in the same time that these paintings are brothers! ...
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2010s Photorealist Paintings

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Oil

AMABILE, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
I love to paint wine because I love to paint red and the dynamism of the liquids. The wine is also the most important product of this land, Everywhere you go here you'll find grapevi...
Category

2010s Photorealist Paintings

Materials

Oil

L'ALTRO LATO, Painting, Oil on Canvas
Located in Yardley, PA
Here I wanted to represent the other side of the things, what we usually don't see, what we usually don't care about, but it is essential to give importance to what we usually look a...
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2010s Photorealist Paintings

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Oil

Photorealist paintings for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Photorealist paintings available for sale on 1stDibs. Works in this style were very popular during the 21st Century and Contemporary, but contemporary artists have continued to produce works inspired by this movement. If you’re looking to add paintings created in this style to introduce contrast in an otherwise neutral space in your home, the works available on 1stDibs include elements of blue, purple, green, pink and other colors. Many Pop art paintings were created by popular artists on 1stDibs, including Gregory Block, James Zamora, Ian Hornak, and Kathleen Keifer. Frequently made by artists working with Paint, and Oil Paint and other materials, all of these pieces for sale are unique and have attracted attention over the years. Not every interior allows for large Photorealist paintings, so small editions measuring 3.5 inches across are also available. Prices for paintings made by famous or emerging artists can differ depending on medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $125 and tops out at $585,000, while the average work sells for $3,772.

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