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Estes painted Hubcap in 2021. In the shiny, reflective surface of a new Volkswagen Beetle’s fender, the artist captured a scene of coastal Maine. Banded layers represent a grassy foreground, teal-colored water, dark pine trees, and a cerulean blue sky studded with white clouds. The painting is strongly vertical, and the composition is compressed onto a narrow board. The landscape, rather than horizontal, thrusts dramatically upward in an emphatic diagonal. The curves and planes of the car parts—the bulging fender, the flat metallic car door, and the circular gas-cap cover—distort the landscape and divide it into different zones in the painting. Estes skillfully represents different textures—the rubber tire, flat gray hubcap, and shiny metal car body and chrome trim.
In combining the highly reflective surfaces of his early work with his growing interest in the natural world, Estes has created a painting that connects his nascent career to his present artistic concerns. In Richard Estes’s Realism, Patterson Sims writes, “Estes’s Maine and worldwide landscapes are as romantically exploratory and fresh, and—in their way—as much an artistic fabrication as the epic nineteenth-century American landscape tradition that they potently extend.”
ProvenancePurchased from Schoelkopf Gallery in 2022
Exhibition History2022
Chrome Dreams and Infinite Reflections: American Photorealism
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (7/15 - 12/31/2022)
DepartmentAmerican Art
Hubcap
Artist
Richard Estes
(American, born 1932)
Date2021
Mediumoil on board
DimensionsCanvas: 18 7/8 × 12 3/4 in. (47.9 × 32.4 cm)
SignedLower right in pencil, RICHARD ESTES 2021
Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds provided by Scottie and David Neill
Object number2022.2.1
DescriptionRichard Estes is one of the founders of Photorealism, the movement in which artists base their paintings on photographs and attempt to capture the look of photography in paint. Estes has been working as a Photorealist since the 1960s and, astonishingly, is still creating new bodies of work today.Estes painted Hubcap in 2021. In the shiny, reflective surface of a new Volkswagen Beetle’s fender, the artist captured a scene of coastal Maine. Banded layers represent a grassy foreground, teal-colored water, dark pine trees, and a cerulean blue sky studded with white clouds. The painting is strongly vertical, and the composition is compressed onto a narrow board. The landscape, rather than horizontal, thrusts dramatically upward in an emphatic diagonal. The curves and planes of the car parts—the bulging fender, the flat metallic car door, and the circular gas-cap cover—distort the landscape and divide it into different zones in the painting. Estes skillfully represents different textures—the rubber tire, flat gray hubcap, and shiny metal car body and chrome trim.
In combining the highly reflective surfaces of his early work with his growing interest in the natural world, Estes has created a painting that connects his nascent career to his present artistic concerns. In Richard Estes’s Realism, Patterson Sims writes, “Estes’s Maine and worldwide landscapes are as romantically exploratory and fresh, and—in their way—as much an artistic fabrication as the epic nineteenth-century American landscape tradition that they potently extend.”
ProvenancePurchased from Schoelkopf Gallery in 2022
Exhibition History2022
Chrome Dreams and Infinite Reflections: American Photorealism
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (7/15 - 12/31/2022)
Status
Not on view