Hyperrealism, as a genre, confronts us with a peculiar dilemma: can something look more real than reality itself and still not be real? The sculptures of Duane Hanson or the paintings of Chuck Close and Roberto Bernardi do not simply imitate life—they arrest it. They stop us in our tracks with a kind of eerie familiarity. But the more we look, the more we realize we are not witnessing realism in the traditional sense. Instead, we are entering someone else’s gaze. These works do not merely replicate life—they reconstruct it through the artist’s lens. And that reconstruction often feels less like realism and more like something hyperunreal.

The term “hyperrealism” implies an intensification of the real—a more faithful, more vivid rendering than even the eye might grasp in ordinary perception. In practice, however, hyperrealist art calls into question the very idea of “realism.” What appears objective on the surface is often layered with emotional nuance, conceptual depth, and aesthetic choice. The genre might seem to strive for a kind of photographic truth, but it ultimately reveals itself to be steeped in subjectivity.

Take Duane Hanson, for example. His life-sized fiberglass sculptures of ordinary people—tourists, janitors, construction workers, security guards—are so painstakingly accurate that viewers often mistake them for real people. They wear actual clothes, carry worn-out bags, and stand or sit in postures of perfect boredom, fatigue, or disengagement. At first glance, Hanson’s work might seem like a perfect case of realism. But in truth, it is highly curated. These aren’t just people from life; they are portraits of a particular American reality, filtered through Hanson’s social commentary. His figures are not beautiful or idealized. They are tired, often marginalized, and seemingly stuck in a world that has little interest in them. Hanson’s hyperrealism forces us to confront not just how these people look, but how society sees them—or chooses not to.

This tension between appearance and meaning is central to the hyperrealist approach. In painting, we find it in the gleaming still lifes of Roberto Bernardi, where bowls of candy or glassware glisten with uncanny perfection. At first, these images might appear neutral—simply beautiful objects rendered with impossible precision. But their perfection is exactly what makes them strange. Bernardi’s works do not mimic life as it is; they present life as polished, staged, and purified. They reveal not reality but desire—our longing for order, beauty, permanence. These are not just objects; they are projections of a certain way of seeing, where surface becomes everything.

Chuck Close’s portraits operate in yet another key. Working initially from photographs, Close painted massive, intimate renderings of faces—pores, wrinkles, and hair follicles all captured in obsessive detail. And yet, the closer you look, the more abstract these portraits become. His later works, built from colored grids and geometric patterns, are even more illustrative of how vision is constructed. What seems like pure realism dissolves into painterly interpretation. Close never claimed to paint what a person “really” looked like—he painted the process of seeing them, the structure of perception itself.

And so we return to the question: is hyperrealism really realism? Or is it something else entirely?

Realism, historically, aimed to represent the world truthfully, without idealization. It emerged as a response to Romanticism and focused on the ordinary, the unvarnished, and the socially real. But even 19th-century realists like Gustave Courbet understood that representation was never neutral. To depict is to choose, and to choose is to interpret. Hyperrealism makes this even clearer. Its subject matter may look objective, but its execution is charged with artistic intention. Every hyperrealist work is a staging of reality—not a mirror, but a frame.

The assumption that hyperrealism is merely a display of technical prowess often prevents viewers from seeing its deeper philosophical stance. The detail is not there just to trick the eye; it’s there to overwhelm it, to create a kind of cognitive dissonance. We feel caught between belief and disbelief, between recognition and suspicion. We ask ourselves: if this looks so real, why does it feel so alien? This emotional distance, this slight unease, is not a flaw in hyperrealism—it is its power.

More importantly, hyperrealism invites us to consider the instability of the real itself. In a world saturated with images, where our daily experience is mediated by screens, filters, and high-definition illusions, what does it mean to see “truthfully”? The hyperrealist artist does not give us reality—they give us a reflection of how they see reality. And their reality, like anyone’s, is subjective, layered, and often disjointed from what we casually call “the real world.”

Artists like Carole Feuerman, whose hyperrealist sculptures of swimmers and bathers glisten with beads of resin sweat and water, explore this interplay between artifice and embodiment. Her figures are deeply sensual and physical, yet also immaculate and timeless—frozen in a kind of eternal presence that no real body ever occupies. What we see is not someone emerging from a pool, but the idea of someone emerging, held in place, unchanging. This is not realism—it’s a form of idealized, heightened stillness.

This complexity is what makes hyperrealism so relevant today. It reflects our cultural condition—a time when we’re constantly faced with images that are technically perfect but emotionally ambiguous. We live in a hyperreal world, one where media, marketing, and technology often construct experiences more intense than actual life. Hyperrealist art both mimics and critiques this reality. It speaks to our confusion about what is genuine, what is performance, what is lived, and what is staged.

In the end, hyperrealism is not a return to realism. It’s an interrogation of it. It asks: What do we mean when we say something looks real? Who decides what reality looks like? What role does the artist play in shaping that vision?

Hyperrealist artists answer not by showing us the world as it is, but the world as they perceive it, feel it, and reimagine it. Their works are not evidence of reality—they are evidence of vision. And that vision, precisely because it is subjective, sometimes appears so clear and complete that it becomes unfamiliar. Not hyperreal, but hyperunreal.