Paintings by Don Eddy, in the MEAM
The museum has organised Catalonia’s first exhibition of one of the maximum exponents of American Hyperrealism
A collection of paintings by North American painter Don Eddy can be seen in the MEAM from the 11th of February onwards. The New York-based artist has pieces in the MoMA and Whitney museums but has not been the subject of a monographic exhibition in Europe since Paris, 1973.
Don Eddy began his artistic career in the 1960s with a series of paintings which paid tribute to the North American urban landscape and incorporated motifs taken from pop culture and post-industrial capitalism. In the 80s he began to paint objects (glassware, tableware and toys) with photographic precision while creating his first polyptychs (multi-panel paintings), which juxtapose poetic images in order to reveal their underlying inter-relationships.
More recently, Eddy began to bestow his photographic realism with a certain metaphysical aura and eight triptychs created by the artist between 2005 and 2011 can be seen in the MEAM up until the 30th of March – images which were inspired by photographs and achieved using a 55-year-old airbrush and an elaborate system of 15 to 25 layers of paint.
The individual panels are separated by distances of just a few centimetres, thereby producing tension between perception and experience and establishing a relationship between the images, the artist and the viewer.