Sayre Gomez and Joan Semmel in Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of art since 1968
24 November 2024—4 May 2025
Group exhibition at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
The first large-scale exhibition to reexamine the postwar art movement of photorealism and trace its lineages in art of the present day, Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 includes more than forty artists (largely though not exclusively North American), spans the 1960s to the present, and features paintings alongside drawings and sculptures. This historical, scholarly, group exhibition recovers the social art history of photorealism and complicates its meaning as a realism.
While photorealism is often regarded as an end–of figuration, of representation, and even of painting at the close of the 1960s–this timely exhibition recasts photorealism as beginning, arguing for its continued presence in contemporary art. It features canonical and under-recognized photorealists of the 1960s and ‘70s (Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Duane Hanson, Idelle Weber); reconsiders well-known figures within photorealist frameworks (John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Barkley L. Hendricks, Joan Semmel, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley); and identifies younger generations of artists’ receptions of photorealism (Gina Beavers, Cynthia Daignault, Sayre Gomez, Vincent Valdez, Christine Tien Wang).