Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York

I am pleased and proud to announce my collaboration with Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York, NY. It’s an honour to work from now on with the iconic Lou Meisel, the art dealer who inspired so many artists and collectors over many decades. He invented and established Photorealism and generated the worldwide movement of Hyperrealism as it is today. Thanks , Lou!

Louis Meisel is considered the ‘founding father’ of the Photorealism movement. Although it later came to be defined by such terms as Hyperrealism, Superrealism and Megarealism, all these names can be traced back to a movement that started with this art dealer in New York, who originally started out in the 1960s and 1960s with just 8 painters, offering a period-appropriate response to the abstract expressionism that dominated the art world at that time.

The movement rapidly gained ground, due in no small part to early museum exhibitions in the USA and Europe and the publication of an immense standard reference volume entitled Photorealism, which weighed a solid 4 kilos.
Sparnaay: ‘That’s how I discovered the work of such artists as Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Don Eddy, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell. My painter’s eyes were opened. What struck me most was that very good, contemporary realist works were still apparently being painted. It would seem that we needed the Americans for that, who looked at the world around them with a fresh eye and open mind, and added to the camera’s objectivity with incredible skills.”

The original gallery space in Prince Street, SoHo, is still where it all happens.
Louis Meisel also has the world’s largest collection of Photorealistic paintings. Within the past 5 years, a gorgeous exhibition showcasing Hyperrealism/Photorealism toured through many American and European cities, including a stint in Rotterdam’s prestigious Kunsthal. Sparnaay’s work was included in that show.
Since 2002, Sparnaay has also been represented in New York: first in Ivan Karp’s legendary OK Harris Works of Art, and when that closed in 2013, he moved to the Bernaducci Meisel Gallery on 57th Street.
He’s now come back to SoHo in 2018, landing in the gallery of Photorealism icon Lou Meisel.