Richard Estes, was born on May 14th in 1932 in Kewanee, Illinois. He is regarded as one of the founders of the photo-realist movement of the late 1960s. At an early age, Estes’ family moved to Chicago, and he went on to study fine arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He then moved to New York City in 1956, and worked for the next ten years as a graphic artist for various magazine publishers and advertising agencies. By 1966, he had devoted himself full time to painting, and by 1971 printmaking became an important part of his creative output.

Cityscapes and geometric views of architecture are strongly associated with Estes’ work, he has depicted scenes of Chicago, Paris, Venice, San Fransisco, Prague, Barcelona, London, Cordoba and Florence, but New York has been his greatest inspiration. By the late 1960s Estes began to paint storefronts and buildings paying particular attention to reflections playing off glass windows. Working directly from photographs, Estes was able to capture the fleeting nature of light, achieving highly complex views of the urban landscape.

Estes developed a highly sophisticated screenprinting technique, one that he first mastered in 1971. Reflections and contrasts between light and shadow, give us a detailed picture of a snapshot in time, his prints achieve an extra-sensory, highly detailed view and have allowed him to produce complex compositions, planning with painstaking accuracy before printing.

The printing process begins with a detailed template in gouache and acrylic, which in turn are photographed. The photograph of the template is used to create stencils employed in the laborious screenprinting process. The complexity of the images Estes produces, which include a great variety of colours, and tonal modulations make the proofing process extremely involved and time consuming.

Estes work can be seen in major collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Neue Galerie der Stadt Aachen, Ludwig Collection, Aachen, Germany; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.