Art movements and social commentary: from superrealism to postmodernism

Art History: From the Early Modern to the Contemporary

Superrealism

A Girl

Ron Mueck

Produced early 2000's

Media - Scuplture

Ron Mueck - "A Girl" (Lina, 2011)

This sculpture is a huge lifelike portrayal of a baby girl. Whereas many artists wish to portray images of life at its best, or better, superrealism movement has tried to show life as it actually is. This work is fascinating because of its size and what it represents. All of us have had this experience, but it is not a memory we have access to.

Making Political Statements

An American Tragedy -- Evergood (The Art Story, N.d.)

An American Tragedy

Phillip Evergood

Oil on Canvas

Faith Ringgold produced works that were visually challenging to viewers and displayed graphic scenes of the consequences of the tense race relations of the 1960s. This piece shows a bloody scene that portrays the same characters in different sequences in the events that unfolded. "Ringgold's mastery of the Western canonical strategy of expressing narrative and figurative movement by placing the same group of figures across the picture plane in various stages of the scene. In contrast to act of reading left to right, the artist situates the stampede-like wrestling of forms in the right side of the canvas, almost spilling over to the left portion of the composition (Harvey, N.d.)."

Post Modern Architecture

Figure 4 - Michael Graves' Portland Building (Graves, 2016)

"Before there could be postmodernism, there had to be a modernism for it to rebel against (Graves, 2016)."

Modern architecture can be summarized with the "less is more" concept in virtually all of its different forms. These forms promoted ideas such as rationality, simplicity, and functionality which held appreciation for some time. Yet, many rebelled against the "blandness" of these forms and began to use different means to make structures more visually appealing. Michael Graves himself went through this transformation throughout his career.

"Michael Graves' Portland Building boldly showed what was next: postmodernism, writ large. In this high-rise civic structure, his unorthodox use of color, texture, and classical allusion defied modernist principles -- and provoked broad debate (Graves, 2016)."

The postmodern structures definitely offer more to the viewer in terms of aesthetic qualities than previous generations did.