Richard Estes

American, born 1932

10 Glass Doors from the portfolio Urban Landscapes

© Richard Estes

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

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© Richard Estes

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

© Richard Estes

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

© Richard Estes

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

10 Glass Doors from the portfolio Urban Landscapes, 1972

Artwork Details

Materials

screen print

Edition:

73/75

Measurements

sheet: 19 3/4 x 27 1/2 inches (50.16 x 69.85 cm)

Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Credit

Charles W. Goodyear Fund, 1973

Accession ID

P1973:4.8

From a distance, this print by Richard Estes, who was a pioneer of Photorealism in the late 1960s, looks like a photograph of the Minneapolis Auditorium, a celebrated modernist building demolished in 1989. Estes based his image on multiple photographs of the building, which allowed him to capture all of the reflections in its glass façade. Although the Minneapolis Auditorium was designed with symmetrical grids of horizontal and vertical lines, the mirroring on its surfaces causes a delirious warping of space that visually destabilizes these orderly forms. Together with other works from this series such as 560 and Seagram Building, 10 Glass Doors indicates that modernism’s simple shapes sheathed in glass are, in fact, less rational and transparent than they initially appear.

Label from Window to Wall: Art from Architecture, November 18, 2017–March 18, 2018