Artist Richard Estes has been capturing New York City through his photorealist paintings for decades, creating hyper-realist street scenes alongside contemporaries like Chuck Close and Audrey Flack. Now, the Museum of Arts & Design in Columbus Circle is showcasing two dozen of Estes's works as part of the artist's first solo museum show.
The exhibition, "Richard Estes: Painting New York City," is comprised of 24 paintings spanning from the 1960s through the present day. The Times reviewed the show today, and though they took issue with the curation, they agree that Estes' work is nothing short of breathtaking:
Mr. Estes’s concern with the nature of seeing is made humorously explicit in “The Eye Man” (2014), an extraordinarily complicated image in which red scaffolding pipes crisscross in front of an optometrist’s store called the Eye Man. You have the sense of seeing more clearly and intensely than you ordinarily do; it’s nearly hallucinatory. There are paradoxes about time, too. While all that you see appears instantly and simultaneously present, it takes time to visually parse the whole picture. It also took a lot of time for Mr. Estes to construct it in paint, and his manifestly slow, patient and careful process of doing so may be vicariously calming for the contemplative viewer...
...One of the show’s most poignant and beautiful paintings is “Bridal Accessories” (1975), which depicts the facade of a bridal shop lit up at night. With more than two dozen female mannequin heads modeling hats and veils in the front window, the image evokes a sense of longing for love and security in a city that often runs roughshod over human vulnerabilities.
"Richard Estes: Painting New York City" is on display now through September 20th.
