20 Amazing Hyper-Realist Painters

Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high resolution photograph. Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are not strict interpretations of photographs, nor are they literal illustrations of a particular scene or subject. Instead, they utilize additional, often subtle, pictorial elements to create the illusion of reality. We present work from 20 of the best hyper-realist painters out there.

Tom Blackwell
Blackwell is one of the photorealists most associated with the style. Blackwell started out as an abstract-expressionist but soon became enamored with the Pop art movement of the 1960s. From abstract expressionism he moved on to large-scale paintings which incorporate shiny metallic objects usually found on motorcycles or other vehicles. His later and current works continue this but often with scenes in which light is reflecting from store windows.

Steve Mills
Born in 1959 in Boston, MA. Raised as a child on Martha’s Vineyard, MA, his family moved to Walpole, MA as a young teen though he has continued to summer on Martha’s Vineyard.
Every child drew when young, though Mills requested a pencil over crayons to get better detail. This fascination with detail became his calling card. He sold his first drawing at the age of 11 and has been selling ever since.

Roberto Bernardi
Roberto Bernardi was born in Todi in 1974. His first works date from the mid eighties, and whilst a young student he dedicated himself to the study of Renaissance painting and pictorial technique, which later proved to be extremely important in the development of his personal creativity. In 1993 he moved to Rome, where he worked as a restorer in the church of San Fransesco a Ripa. After this experience, he dedicated himself full time to the creation of his own hyper-realist works.

Robert Gniewek
Described as a second generation Photorealist painter, Robert Gniewek (1951 – ) paints American roadside culture from the late 1940′s and early 1950′s, documenting small town cafes, diners, gas stations, and motels. He was born in Detroit, Michigan. He received his BFA and MFA from Wayne State University. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the country, and featured in Louis Meisel’s book, Photorealism since 1980.

Eric Christensen
Eric Christensen began painting professionally in 1992. Since that time he has enjoyed amazing success and a growing reputation as a celebrated Wine Country Artist. Self-taught, he invented a watercolor technique that allows him to create images of vibrant color that go beyond the look and depth of a high quality photograph. Christensen now finds himself unique in his field. In fact he is the only known artist capable of hyperrealism through the use of standard watercolor.

John Baeder
John Baeder (born December 24, 1938 in South Bend, Indiana) is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealist movement. He is best known for his detailed paintings of American roadside diners and eateries.

Randy Dudley
American photorealist artist, Randy Dudley (born 1950) works both in New York City and in the Midwest. Dudley spends many hours to achieve work that looks exactly like a photograph, visual reality. Dudley’s goal is to challeng the viewer to look at something for the first time, to see the beauty and vistas of scenes often hurriedly passed by such as a canal, a river, or a water view.

Mark Goings
When he decided to become an artist, Mark Goings found himself in familiar company — his father, Ralph Goings, and his brother, Drew Goings, are both photorealist painters. He focused on art courses during his three years at American River College in Sacramento, California, the area where he grew up. Throughout the years, Goings has shown work at several San Francisco galleries, including Louis K. Meisel Gallery, Himovitz Gallery and the Circle Gallery.

David Cone
Davis Cone is the celebrated American realist artist who has chosen Art Deco movie theatres as his only subject. His meticulous chronicles of these icons of American life are included in virtually every important collection of contemporary American representational art. A native of Augusta, Georgia, Davis Cone began exhibiting regionally in 1977. By 1981, his work was shown in Tokyo, Lisbon, Madrid and Nuremburg in addition to many American cities.

Franz Gertsch
Franz Gertsch is a Swiss painter known for his large format hyperrealistic portraits. Gertsch was born 1930 in Mörigen, Switzerland. Between 1947 and 1952 he studied with Max von Mühlenen and Hans Schwarzenbach in Bern.

Bertrand Meniel
Bertrand Meniel (b. 1961, Boulogne Billancourt, France) initially studied to be a physiotherapist. Pursuing his artistic leaning while in his early thirties, he studied drawing for five years at the Association pour le Développement de l’Action Culturelle de Paris. In the past decade, Meniel has many successful exhibits throughout the Unites States as his focus is primarily on urban landscapes, most notably South Beach and its art deco charm and allure. As a leading photorealist, he obviously is known for his meticulous detail and precision, while his subject matter allows him to saturate his images with both color and light.

Raphaella Spence
Raphaella Spence was born in London in 1978. Her family travelled to France where she spent the first eight years of her life. When they returned to London she continued her studies and her interest in art began to emerge. Her initial works were academic still life paintings. At age twelve her family moved definitively to Italy where she completed her studies at the St. Georges English School in Rome. Influenced by views of the Umbrian countryside, Spence turned toward the creation of the Photorealist landscape.

Tom Martin
Tom Martin is a 23 year old hyperrealist painter from the UK.

Pedro Campos
Pedro Campos (46), is an incredible hyperrealist painter from Madrid, Spain. Using oil paints he recreates incredibly realistic still life shots that many might mistake for a photograph. He’s worked in a variety of creative fields from interior decorating, illustration (at an ad agency), to art restoration on furnishings, paintings and sculptures.

Denis Peterson
Denis Peterson started drawing at the age of four and continued for the next fifteen years under the tutelage of his grandfather, an atelier master fresco painter and close protégé of Claude Monet. As a premier restorer of Rembrandts, his grandfather later taught Denis the lost arts of classical painting and restoration.
Denis maintained an active studio while attaining his BFA; exhibiting his work at galleries in New York and restoring Renaissance paintings for museums. He was later awarded a prestigious Teaching Fellowship at Pratt, where he attained an MFA in Painting and Art History.

John Salt
John Salt is an English artist, whose obsessively detailed paintings from the late 1960s onwards made him one of the pioneers of the photorealist school. Although Salt’s work has developed through several distinct phases, it has generally focussed on images of cars, often shown wrecked or abandoned within a suburban or semi-rural American landscape, with the banality and dishevelment of the subject matter contrasting with the immaculate and meticulous nature of the work’s execution.

Mary Ellen Johnson
Mary Ellen Johnson is a Precision Realist oil painter known for her Food Paintings.

Johannes Müller-Franken
Johannes Müller-Franken is the first son of Egon Müller franc, German actor ( Stukas , 1941) and his wife Helga and brother of Sebastian Müller-Franken. After graduating from high school in 1978 he started an internship as a background artist at the City Theater in Mainz. He studied at Johannes-Gutenberg-University in arts education with emphasis on film with Kurt Weber, a former cinematographer. Müller-Franken lives in Munich.

Don Jacot
Jacot began drawing in Detroit, Michigan, in 1981 for recreation, using charcoal on paper to interpret photographs of works by famous masters, such as Charles Sheeler and Walker Evans. He took basic drawing classes at Wayne State University and is essentially self-taught. In 1983 he began to seriously pursue art as a full-time career while performing part-time work as a physician’s assistant. Jacot works in acrylics, oils, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal, but concentrates on oil painting.

Mike Bayne
Mike Bayne attended Queen’s University and received a BAH and BFA in 2001. In 2004, he received an MFA from Concordia University. He has had several solo exhibitions with Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto and has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Chicago, New York, Vancouver, and Toronto.