To the Supermarket

Photorealist Ralph Goings’ 1975 watercolor Gem Top captures an ordinary run to the supermarket with mesmerizing precision.  Set against an asphalt parking lot heated by the California sun, the reflective qualities of the work’s background supermarket opens the space up through its glass windows plastered with advertisements enticing shoppers with such deals as “Coffee: $1.69.”  

A quintessential symbol of American consumerism, the supermarket made its way across the Atlantic to inspire Chanel’s recent Spring Collection at the Grand Palais in Paris, where Lagerfeld refurbished the space into a chic “Chanel Shopping Center” boasting Chanel-ified products such as ‘Coco Flakes.’ Both Goings and Lagerfeld repurpose the mundane and universal chore of food-shopping into livable works of art, capturing the visual vocabulary of a shopper’s experiences with bold, repetitive signs and functional architectural elements housing aisles of merchandise, or in Gem Tops, rows of parking spaces.

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You can view this work at Photorealism: The Everyday Illuminated, on view at Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art until August 15th.