Réalisme d’aujourd’hui

Monica Kim Garza, Erin M. Riley, Christian Rex van Minnen and Theo Triantafyllidis all have in common the transgression of the academic rules of modern art and question the judgment of aesthetics. The representation of a daily life, fantastic or fundamentally real, and the exploration of social themes make these four artists realists who shake up artistic ideals and hierarchies.

In 1960, the new realists broke with “the lyricism of abstraction” and proposed new “perceptual approaches to the real”. However, Yves Klein preferred the term “today’s realism” because the adjective “new” did not seem appropriate.​

The reality of women’s daily lives is broached by Erin M. Riley and Monica Kim Garza. The first presents an engaged art, unveiling the raw everyday life of women and giving it its place in history by a laborious and hand-crafted process of creation, while the second sketches natural women who are at ease with themselves in spontaneous postures and ordinary but not prosaic situations. Christian Rex van Minnen and Theo Triantafyllidis depict creatures or heaps of interactive elements punctuated with very popular today’s references and everyday objects. The precision and hyperrealism of van Minnen’s oil paintings, or the endless videos of Triantafyllidis, generated by algorithms, set new standards and plunge us into a new reality.

Four artists, four singularities, four truths gathered for the first time to reveal a contemporary reality, today’s realism.