On view
Wayne Thiebaud’s lushly painted glimpses of everyday life—from a slice of pie to a steep San Francisco streetscape—are icons of American Pop Art. This exhibition spans the course of his prolific career, from the early paintings he made as a young student to the vibrant beach scenes on which Thiebaud, now 89, has been working most recently.
For centuries, people have admired artists’ magical ability to depict reality—the virtuoso dab of paint that becomes a pearl in a Vermeer painting, for example. What is realism in the 21st century, when our world has taken on a virtual as well as physical dimension? Real and HyperReal contrasts traditional realism rooted in careful observation of our immediate, visible world with new riffs on realism that mirror the expansive realities of the information age.
From buttery brushstrokes to massive, sculptural buildups of surfaces, many contemporary artists—like the impressionists and fauves before them—let the paint tell the story.