"One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."

-Graham Thompson, "American Culture in the Twentieth Century" Edinburgh University Press (U.K.) 2007

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Denis learned drawing, painting and art restoration under the tutelage of his grandfather, a master atelier painter and protégé of Claude Monet. By the time he received a BFA, Denis was already restoring 17th century Flemish paintings for museums. Denis was later awarded a teaching fellowship at Pratt, where he attained an MFA in painting while widely exhibiting his work.

His early photorealist paintings were shown at the Brooklyn Museum, in universities and at New York galleries. These iconic works were airbrushed with acrylic paints, something not attempted by any known painters at the time. His large figurative paintings were notably distinguished by uniquely "cropped" images (see above work) as an aesthetic parody on photography - groundbreaking then, commonplace today.

Following two decades of painting, the next two were a disconnect. Denis has since returned to photorealism, this time in a much more visually articulated form of the genre he termed hyperrealism, breaking once again with the formal conventions of traditional painting and its aesthetic limitations.

Denis paints fulltime at his Long Island art studio and currently exhibits his controversial work in thematic series.