黑料不打烊

Hyperrealist and photorealist artists play with the boundaries of perception, the fine line between art and life. Can you distinguish between artwork and reality in the following pictures?

was a term first used by the Belgian collector Isy Brachot. It was the title of his blockbuster 1973 exhibition in Brussels, which included work by Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter. As an extreme but logical progression from representational , artists in the 1970s began working from photographs, hoping to achieve highly mimetic depictions of the modern world.

The increasingly mechanical nature of daily life in the 20th and 21st centuries meant some artists felt an impulse towards detail and detachment in representing urban or ‘pop’ subject matter. Out of photorealism grew hyperrealism, which in part reacted against the coldly urbane feel of its predecessor, preferring to show intensely ‘real’ and expressive human figures, often in close-up.

In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote that “the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself”. This tricky thought is at the centre of hyperrealist art - the idea that ‘simulation’ of reality opens up an uncanny gap between ‘the real’ and its self-image. This can be a powerful experience, and Baudrillard argues that it has been used both by capitalist power-structures and in creative acts of resistance against those same structures.

Though hyperrealists would resist their works being labelled as , artists such as Duane Hanson, Carole Feuerman, and Glennray Tutor can often play uncanny tricks with the eye. See if you can identify which images show artworks in the examples below. It’s harder than you might think!

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