About this work
Richard Estes is one of the leading artists associated with Photorealism, a movement that emerged in America in the late 1960s. He trained at the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid 1950s and moved to New York in 1968. Estes is known for his detailed, coolly detached paintings and screenprints of the urban environment. He works from photographs, changing angles and introducing complex reflections to create compositions that reconstruct, rather than record, reality. Estes made his first screenprints in 1972, and this work, Qualicraft shoes, shows the large scale and increased complexity he attained in the medium within two years.