Explore our online gallery with photorealism paintings for sale. Showcasing art from painters active today, our collection is ever-evolving. Not sure where to start? Take a look at our photorealistic drawings and prints or discover more about the artists: Brigitte Yoshiko Pruchnow, Mark Metacalfe and Kukuh Nuswantara

Method

To achieve high levels of detail many artists projected photographs directly on to the canvas, allowing them to replicate the colour, light and shadow accurately. Other artists, such as Chuck Close, used a grid method, to ensure the scale is accurate, and an airbrush technique originally used to retouch photographs.

Studying photographs or projecting them onto the canvas allows artists to capture the light and shadow particularly well. This is evident in Charles Bell’s work, who typically painted from still life photographs of objects such as vintage toys or gum ball machines, replicating their glassy and glossy surfaces.

Style and Subject Matter

The photorealism style developed alongside artistic movements such as Pop art, Conceptual art and Minimalism. These movements all reflected a growing interest in realism and a shift away from expressionism and abstraction.

This shift is also evident in photorealism, which demanded intricate planning and a painstaking process, compared to improvisation and automatism, which typically defined the preceding movements.

Photorealism represented a return to the celebration of craftsmanship and technique, which was typical of academic and traditional art. For this reason, it is often overlooked within the Avant Garde canon.

However, while the technique was more traditional in its method, the subject matter was unmistakably modern. The glossy finish and hyper realistic style lent itself well to images of everyday life and modern culture.

Ralph Goings was an American Photorealist painter. Still Life with Straws (1978) depicts diner items such as a ketchup bottle and a cup of straws. These objects are isolated with no background, yet their familiarity allows the audience to gauge their environment. The sepia tones and photorealism style add a sense of nostalgia, while the glossy finish elevates this simple, everyday scene into the realm of high art.