CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Graphic Realism
Figurative work in a flattened, poster-like style of bold outlines, simplified shapes and limited colour, often printed or stencilled.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Graphic realism translates people and places into the language of printed media: high contrast, crisp edges and a few flat colours. Its roots lie in early 20th-century posters, comic strips and woodcuts, and in the 1960s, when Roy Lichtenstein enlarged comic panels and Alex Katz reduced portraits to smooth, flat planes.
Screenprinting kept the style close to politics. Rupert García made stark posters from photographs of activists, cutting faces down to two or three tones. Thomas W. Benton printed bold posters in Aspen in the late 1960s and 1970s. Street artists took the look outdoors: Swoon wheatpastes cut-paper portraits onto walls, and Shepard Fairey's stencilled Hope portrait of Barack Obama (2008) spread worldwide. Paul Catherall cuts linocuts of London buildings in flat, restrained colour, and Raymond Pettibon's ink drawings borrow from comics and pulp illustration. Look for outlines doing the work of modelling, and shadows turned into solid shapes.
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