Realism: Paintings and Sculptures

Dennis Adams, Chuck Agro, Eric Bainbridge, Gilles Barbier, William Beckman, Davis Cone, Folkert De Jong, Daniel Douke, Randy Dudley, Hugo McCloud, Manuel Neri, Kaz Oshiro, Jacob Rochester, John Salt, George Segal, Joe Zucker

For the first time we are pleased to show Realism: Paintings and Sculptures, a diverse show of artworks from the late 1960s through 2025 of representations of reality or examples from the artists’ imagination. The exhibition presents an underrecognized but prevalent approach to making art that is not restricted to one moment in time. Realism can be described as an artists’ use of highly skilled techniques to render the world or their imaginations faithfully. The show presents multiple approaches to representing reality specifically after 1960, which range from the photorealistic paintings of Davis Cone, Randy Dudley, John Salt, Jacob Rochester, and Max Ferguson to the inventive surreal figures of Folkert de Jong and Gilles Barbier.

For most of the history of Western art, realism has dominated as the main technique used to render the world. Prime examples include the early bison painted on the caves of Lascaux, through 15th Century Flemish art, the Italian Renaissance and the European Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity, which emerged after World War I. What distinguishes artists engaging in realistic practices after the 1960s however, is the engagement of Modern Art. One example is the centrally placed sculpture in the exhibition, Occurrence on an Endless Column (1987) by British artist Eric Bainbridge. The work is a whimsical fabric covered tower of a red bear, leopard print box and purple donkey in an upward motion toward the sky. The title of the work references the famous Modern work of Constantin Brancusi--Endless Column (1918) whose repeating patterns appear to extend into infinity. Bainbridge’s irreverent iteration of Brancusi’s famous piece is a humorous alternative to the well-respected artist’s work. Additionally, the painting Washer/Dryer (2001) by Japanese artist Kaz Oshiro came as a result of the artist wanting to refine his practice to divert from the Abstract Expressionist artists of the 1950s whose primary mode of working was abstract paintings on canvas. In this work, he uses the canvas itself to create an inconspicuous object that is identical in appearance to an actual washer and dryer machine.