Vielmetter Los Angeles congratulates Andrea Bowers on the inclusion of her work in the exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The exhibition is organized by Anna Katz, Senior Curator, with Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant, and is on view from November 23, 2024 through May 4, 2025.

The first large-scale exhibition to reexamine the postwar art movement of photorealism and trace its lineages in art of the present day, Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 includes more than forty artists (largely though not exclusively North American), spans the 1960s to the present, and features paintings alongside drawings, sculptures, and archival materials. This historical, scholarly, group exhibition recovers the social art history of photorealism and complicates its meaning as a realism.

Ordinary People examines the representational politics of photorealist painting in the context of the recent rise of figurative portraiture, considering its key place in the ongoing remedial project carried out by folks of marginalized identities to repopulate the museum with pictures of people and places historically excluded or disfigured. It further explores photorealism’s significance as painting of everyday life, and pulls apart the intrinsic tension between ordinary images and extraordinary artistic methods by focusing on relationships of labor, value, populism, and taste. As well, it takes seriously the myriad ways artists have deployed photorealism to entice viewers with a non-confrontational aesthetic often only to show images of painful historical events and social experiences that might otherwise be regarded as too difficult to look at, or too easy to ignore. Finally, the exhibition asserts the primacy of photorealism to critically think through the 21st-century attention economy’s glut of image production.

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