With Competing with Reality, the Museum Frieder Burda devotes a major survey exhibition to Photorealism, tracing six decades of this art movement from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day. Around 90 works demonstrate how the artists pursued a technically highly ambitious form of painting that rivals photography in precision and visual power.
Photorealism emerged in the USA as a counter-movement to Abstract Expressionism. Instead of gesture and introspection, everyday American motifs took centre stage — shop windows, diners, cars, cityscapes — painted with an almost exaggerated sharpness. What at first glance appears to be a mere duplication of the visible world turns out, on closer inspection, to be a calculated illusion: the painters worked with humour, ambivalence and alienation, raising the question of just how “real” an image can actually be.
The exhibition brings together key works by the American pioneers such as Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Robert Bechtle and Audrey Flack, and draws a connection to contemporary positions as well as to German artists such as Gerhard Richter and Karin Kneffel. The loans come from major collections, including the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.