MANCHESTER, NH.- Imagine paintings that look so real that you feel you can walk into the canvas and back in time, or sculptures so lifelike that you want to reach out and become part of the scene. Still Life: 1970s Photorealism, on view at the Currier Museum of Art from January 24 through May 3, 2015, takes you back to a world filled with muscle cars, endless highways, diners, 1970s cityscapes and more. If you lived through the 1960s and 1970s, these images will seem intensely familiar. The artworks that are on view in this exhibition reflect a passion for hyperrealism and provide today’s audiences with an unflinching journey back in time to life 40 years ago.

“People are immediately drawn to these works of art,” said Kurt Sundstrom, Currier curator. “Most baby boomers will view this show nostalgically but everyone will appreciate each artist’s precision in creating these seemingly real scenes. The bottom line is that you can’t help but be fascinated when you look at this exhibition.”

In the 1970s, a loosely-knit group of primarily American artists including Richard Estes, Duane Hanson, Tom Blackwell and Audrey Flack decided that art should accurately reflect the world we see around us. Photorealists took photographs of commonplace scenes, some not even in sharp focus, and precisely revisited those captured worlds in monumental paintings and sculptures. Viewed from a distance, these works faithfully capture a scene, but as with impressionistic paintings, when viewed up close, the artist’s brushstrokes become easily visible. As with the Currier’s recent M.C. Escher exhibition, the deeper you look at these works of art, the more dazzled you will be by the artists’ skills.

Still Life: 1970s Photorealism was organized by the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Conn. and has been on view at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, N.Y. It will include 37 works from the Yale collection and an additional six from the Currier. The Boston Globe, in its review of the Yale exhibition, called it, “thought provoking,” emphasizing the fascinating “tension between the there-and-then of photography and the here-and-now of painting.”