How do you honor your idols? Do you hang up their posters, drown your ears in their music, spend your every free moment telling friends and strangers why their impact is unparalleled? Do you Google their names, read up on their Wikipedia pages, Instagram them as your #MCM and #WCW?
If you're artist Otto Duecker, you just draw them. Maybe draw is too casual a word. You meticulously and skillfully translate their every wrinkle, hair and blemish into a pencil mark, rendering an image so accurate it's realer than real. It's hyperreal.
Hyperrealism is the contentious genre that makes many an Internet art hound drool with wonder. Praised for its technical prowess, critiqued for its conceptual simplicity, hyperrealism translates reality into flattened image with such prowess it's hard to believe you're not looking at a photograph.
The dissenters challenge hyperrealism's lack of imagination when it comes to selecting a subject and style, which traditionally remain relatively straight forward. Duecker, however, plays with convention, "mounting" his drawings onto a fictitious wall via tape he draws himself. The artist invites the viewer into a fully two-dimensional world, pulling back the frame and questioning the limits of the real.
If you're interested in the buzzy genre that is hyperrealism -- the staples of the tradition and the ways those staples have been toyed with -- you've come to the right place. Or, if you just want to see some jaw-dropping homages to brilliant minds including Basquiat, Picasso, Warhol and Yoda, that works too.
See some of Duecker's images below:
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