A new show at MoCA LA attempts to expand the definition of the genre, but can it keep up with a rapidly destabilising visual culture?
Photorealism has always had a mixed reputation. A niche genre of painting popularised during the 1960s by artists like Richard Estes, Audrey Flack and the gallerist Louis K. Meisel, photorealism’s original practitioners were disparaged by critics and academics for their shiny, uncritical depictions of consumer culture, especially when compared to the Pop art ironists and lofty Abstract Expressionists of their time. A 44-artist exhibition at MoCA’s Grand Avenue location, Ordinary People attempts to expand the definition of the genre beyond its oft-dismissed early practitioners, positioning these alongside works by contemporary artists who paint, sculpt and collage from photographs in order to privilege alternative, overlooked scenes of everyday life. Although in its best moments the exhibition presents artworks that are as uncanny and unreliable as images currently circulating online, MoCA’s contemporary update on this twentieth-century genre remains overly reliant on a since-broken trust between viewer and image.
Some works do little to dispel original accusations of superficiality: Estes’s oil and acrylic painting The Candy Store (1969) shows a 1950s storefront with baskets of sweets, peanuts and cashews for sale, the products accented by a then-new midcentury infrastructure of bright fluorescent rods and crystal-clear windows. In an adjacent gallery, Robert Bechtle’s oil painting Alameda Gran Torino (1974) shows the classic car parked nose-first in a sunny suburban driveway. These painterly mediations, rendered carefully from contemporaneous photography, glisten like billboards for postwar American life.
In the more recent explorations, the seamless consumerism ostensibly espoused by the earlier artists becomes a laborious and awkward pursuit, especially for women. Gone are smooth roads and bright lightbulbs: Catherine Murphy’s painting Bathroom Sink (1994) features locks of cut hair floating in a clogged sink. The artist’s commitment to photorealism is noted in the wall text: Murphy constructed another bathroom so that the original could remain untouched, allowing her to photograph and paint the scene accurately. Three striking works by Takako Yamaguchi display cropped angles of constrictive clothing: one of them, Untitled (Skirt and Belt) (2012–17), focuses on the cinched midsection of a woman, the belt pulled tight across the flesh beneath. Where Estes’s and Bechtle’s works presented an idealised vision of American life, these contemporary forays capture evidence of its discomforts.
Ordinary People falters when it fails to acknowledge how often images lie: how their meanings change depending on context and how easy they are to co-opt and manipulate. In Andrea Bowers’s People Before Profits (May Day March, Los Angeles, 2012) (2012), a protester holding a sign with the titular phrase stands in the middle of the blank sheet of paper. The sparse, clean composition recalls the iconography of advertising and does a disservice to the anticapitalist message its subject attempts to deliver. (According to the wall label, the work is from the private collection of an investment portfolio manager.) Elsewhere, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s American Pawn Shop (2024) shows a lifesize, mixed-media rendering of a pawn shop’s facade: we buy gold, says one lightbox sign. The work, in one sense, indicts photorealism’s earlier mores by depicting consumerism’s desperate ends; in the wall text’s curatorial view, however, it is an ‘homage to the entrepreneurial ecosystem that forms the backbone of grassroots, neighborhood commerce’, as if some storefronts, like the one in The Candy Store, represent sites of oppression, while others are uplifting simply because they represent other kinds of consumerism. The show’s framing is an inaccurate container for its artists; works deployed to support the inclusive ‘representational politics’ mentioned in the exhibition materials actually prove far more volatile, depicting what happens when artistic realism, marginalisation and commerce are misaligned.
Indeed, images often conceal – or warp – more than they reveal, and those artworks that highlight this instability are the ones that succeed. Cynthia Daignault’s standout 486-panel oil painting Twenty-Six Seconds (2024), a frame-by-frame recreation of Abraham Zapruder’s amateur 8mm film of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, shows only mysterious outlines of the action, her thick brushstrokes obscuring all detail. Sayre Gomez’s painting 2 Spirits (2024), featuring an eerie view of an la skyline, is actually a composite of photographs and fictional illustrations of buildings and an orange sunset. These artworks not only extend the legacy of photorealism but complicate it, using its illusory techniques to reexamine the accuracy of photographs themselves. Ordinary People is best when it acknowledges the role of the image today: something we used to rely on and can’t any longer.
Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art Since 1968 at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through 4 May
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
