At first glance, Hyper-realism is a style of art that doesn’t seem leave a lot of room for experimentation. If an artist is just representing the figure and the goal is accuracy, how much variation from artist to artist could there really be? However, by looking at the works and motivations of just a few such artists, one can easily dispel this notion.
Ron Mueck is an artist who creates figures of the sort of people of which artists don’t usually make figures. Depicting elderly and overweight people, pregnant women and newborns, all in poses that look natural and full of life, the sculptures are hardly distinguishable from real humans. Along with his interesting choice of subject and posing however, Mueck also plays with scale to change the character of a figure or how it’s perceived. He’ll even alter the scale of individual parts of the body to further the mood that he’s trying to convey. Something that’s even more interesting and impressive is that this artist will use a model for part of his sculpting to get the information he needs and then fill in the rest with what “feels right,” so even though the sculptures look lifelike and real, they’re not completely representational of the models they were referenced from.
Evan Penny, another artist working with hyper-realism, uses a very different concept in his art. Rather than create narrative poses and characteristics, Penny often instead tries to remove these traits or show how they change a character through the juxtaposition of multiple pieces of the same figure with minor changes in simple things like a leg position or length of hair. Penny tries to remove pose elements that can be linked to concepts like gender and sexuality as well as any sort of action. His figures try to convey just “being.”
Duane Hanson takes yet another approach. Rather than taking the narrative and character of his sculptures into his own hands or carefully choosing interesting subjects, Hanson instead recreates the most average individuals in his society with an incredible attention to detail.  Despite his common, everyday subjects, Hanson’s sculptures are painstakingly perfect, with every detail flawless attended to. If not for their stillness, it would be impossible to even tell some of these figures aren’t real. Later on in his life, he took an interesting turn of showing grotesque and morbid sculptures of different corpses, which are quite different, but still given the same level of attention to detail and still individuals with their own average stories like his other work.
A common thread among these recent sculptors employing hyper-realism in their representations of the human figure seems to be the acknowledgement and elevation of the small, mundane details of each human they sculpt. Rather than smoothing away the bags of skin and fat or wrinkles or unsightly joints to create a flawless, perfect hero, hyper-realist sculptors embrace these unique details as part of what makes the figures human-like, relatable, and interesting. At the same time, a sculpture skillfully utilizing hyper-realism can create a sculpture that looks completely real, but has even then been modified and adjusted to create pieces that are even more interesting because of a carefully constructed composition or story about the character being shown. Another important advantage hyper-realistic art of humans is that viewers are really able to stop and look at a fake figure with all its perfectly reproduced imperfections in a way that they wouldn’t be able to do or wouldn’t feel comfortable doing with a real person.
