Shop windows reflecting the street, bus windows layering interior and exterior spaces, skyscrapers multiplied in the glass of another façade: for over sixty years, artist Richard Estes has painted the city as a system of mirrors, a duplicate of itself that seems like an illusion, an image within an image.
From July 15, the Schoelkopf Gallery in New York will host “My Camera is My Sketchbook”, an exhibition conceived to bring into focus the meticulous process that has always fueled this urban vision: the photographs the artist has accumulated over time as working material, here exhibited for the first time as autonomous works.
Born in 1932, Estes has been one of the undisputed pioneers of American photorealism. Since the 1970s, he has constructed paintings based on his own shots, often layered and orchestrated into artificial compositions and complex visions that move away from a mimetic realism based on the mere replication of optical data. Although this pictorial movement has often been associated with an almost mechanical precision, the exhibition clearly reveals its illusionistic nature, made possible by the use of photography as a tool for study and iconographic definition.
Richard is a living icon of American painting. While trends and movements come and go, Richard has stayed true to his vision and singular approach to painting for more than 50 years.
Damien Hirst
“Richard Estes: My Camera is My Sketchbook” focuses on two key places in the artist’s life: New York, where he moved in 1958 and has never stopped painting—from the Statue of Liberty to Penn Station, from Times Square to Lincoln Center—and Maine, where he found a quieter counterpoint to urban frenzy. The photographs on display, taken digitally and printed by the artist himself, address recurring subjects in his work to suggest an additional interpretive key: considering Estes’s oeuvre as a visual archive of the transformations undergone by the American built environment in the postwar period.
Placed alongside the finished works, these images reveal a rigorous method based on prolonged and systematic attention to changes in the urban fabric, offering a snapshot that is at once recognizable and artificial—deconstructed and recomposed, filtered and ultimately interpreted through the painterly gesture.
Exhibition: Richard Estes: My Camera is My Sketchbook Where: Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, United States Dates: July 15, 2026 – August 21, 2026