This post was originally published on artnews.com
A trio of portraits captures the denizens of 1980s Los Angeles going about their daily lives. In one, a lithe taxi dancer in a blue dress offers a glance equal parts sultry and weary. In another, a woman stops for a moment as she balances a blanketed infant and an ice cream cone. In a third, a man wraps his arm awkwardly around a woman, in a pose that suggests they’d hurried together for the snapshot. “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (through May 4), opens with these three 1983–84 works by LA-based painter John Valadez. Since the mid-1970s, Valadez has used photographs as source material for his canvases. And, in them, you see as the camera sees: snapshots of bodies frozen in time, in informal poses that defy the ceremonious nature of painted portraiture. The conventions of photorealism have long guided the artist’s work, but by opening with Valadez, “Ordinary People” signals right off that this is not your average photorealism show.
This Pop-adjacent impulse, which got its start in the 1960s, has for decades rested on a definition established by New York gallerist and author Louis K. Meisel, whose 1980 Photorealism became the movement’s defining book. Photorealism, he wrote, included not only painters whose renderings were as realistic and detailed as photographs, but those who employed photography as a tool and emulated the aesthetics of the camera in their work. Listed in the text were 13 key artists, many of them now well-known, such as Chuck Close, Robert Bechtle, and Richard Estes. All 13 were white, and only one was a woman: Audrey Flack, a painter known for boldly saturated depictions of cluttered dressing tables marrying the drama of Dutch vanitas painting with the glare of the camera’s flash. Meisel’s list centered work that riffed on US consumer culture—cluttered storefronts, chromed-out midcentury diners, and whale-size automobiles—and it became the template for other exhibitions that followed. When the now shuttered Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin presented “Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s” in 2009, it featured the 13 artists Meisel named, with minimal additions.
MOCA’s exhibition expands the frame. Curator Anna Katz included some of the movement’s standard-bearers: Bechtle, Estes, Flack. But she featured numerous works by women and people of color, along with artists who have expanded the photorealist impulse, employing it to new ends. Valadez, for example, who is Chicano, depicts quotidian aspects of Mexican American life as a way of countering stereotypes. “The idea was to basically dare people to look at a class of people—highly rendered,” he tells the curators in the catalog. “I was finally developing a technique through my drawing from photography that … was no cartoon style. There was no stylization. You’re basically looking at real people.”
Instead of offering a comprehensive historical exhibition, “Ordinary People” is structured around loose themes that reflect the distinct ways in which photorealism has been employed. An early gallery, for example, presents works from different eras inspired by personal snapshots, featuring paintings of family gatherings and other intimate moments. Déjà Vu, a poignant 1986 canvas by San Francisco painter Lenore Chinn, is a tribute to her friend Tommy Bridges, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1984. It depicts Chinn, looking stylish in a fedora and fur jacket, along with another friend, G. David Murphy, reflected in a mirror in Bridges’s apartment. Murphy’s face is hidden behind the camera whose flash illuminates specks of dust that hang in the air. They have come to pack up their friend’s belongings in the wake of his death. It’s a mournful view of queer community coming together at the height of the AIDS crisis. And though it is rendered realistically, it’s also imbued with painterly touches: the flash emits spattered paint instead of light; the images of dancers that hang on the wall are composed of loose brushstrokes.
The show also explores themes like portraiture, politics, and protest. The result is absorbingly eclectic. In one gallery, you’ll see Barkley K. Hendricks’s magnetic Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris (1972), showing three different views of a dapper Black man with an Afro wearing a red trench coat. In another, you’ll find the engrossing Twenty-Six Seconds, a 2024 installation by Cynthia Daignault that painstakingly re-creates the Zapruder footage of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination frame by frame on 486 individual 8-by-10-inch canvases, allowing the viewer to dwell on every split second of that historic moment. Elsewhere, in a room devoted to urban themes, the millennial artist Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. re-creates the facade of a pawn shop in American Pawn Shop (2024), complete with graffiti, job flyers, and fictional band posters for real performers such as Drakeo the Ruler and Chino Pacas. Where the original photorealists reflected on the gloss of consumerism, Gonzalez depicts its bleak endpoint.
The eclecticism, however, results in some mystifying inclusions. Martin Wong’s paintings of brick walls nod at realism, but how they fit into a show of paintings inspired by photography goes unexplained. The same goes for a series of sculptures by Marilyn Levine, a Canadian artist known for creating trompe l’oeil ceramics inspired by articles of clothing. But this is a minor gripe. Collectively, the diverse range of works in “Ordinary People” tells an intriguing story about the way our existence is increasingly mediated by the camera. Color palettes emulate the yellowing fade of old photographs and the overly saturated or unnaturally cool tones of digital imagery, a reminder that the camera is rarely an objective observer. In some, a picture’s photographer makes a ghostly appearance on a reflective surface, making visible the artist’s gaze.
Recent works show how artists continue to update the photorealist approach. Sayre Gomez’s 2 Spirits (2024), for example, features the sun setting behind a mural of a spectral figure that seems inspired by William Blake. Gomez’s painting is based on an actual mural located in Boyle Heights, but the background—a strip mall bearing a towering liquor store sign—has been added as backdrop from another location. Some original photorealists likewise tweaked reality in their canvases, but an artist working in the style today uses photographs made increasingly malleable by software like Photoshop. In the past, many critics dubbed photorealism gauche and consigned the movement to painting’s past. But as “Ordinary People” deftly shows, its themes couldn’t be more contemporary.