Lost in Thought: The Blurring of Life and Art in the Visual Realism and Superrealism of Gustave Courbet, Duane Hanson, and Karl Ove Knausgaard

Abstract:The blurring of life and art is at the center of Karl Ove Knausgaard's explorations in his memoir, My Struggle, Book 1. Like life, Knausgaard’s book is filled with boring tasks, objects, and events, through which he sifts attempting to locate intrinsic significance. Rendering in hyperreal detail aestheticizing mundane domestic moments positions him as the literary inheritor of the visual art movements of realism and superrealism, alongside artists Gustave Courbet and Duane Hanson. Superrealist art nudges us into examination of life and peers over the edge for a glimpse of what lies beyond the nothingness of the mundane.