The Menil Drawing Institute presents "Hyperreal: Gray Foy," featuring the meticulous and imaginative drawings by midcentury American artist Gray Foy (1922–2012). The exhibition celebrates two recent gifts of nearly 80 drawings and will span the artist’s largely overlooked career, from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Foy’s early works were influenced by Surrealism and often featured contorted bodies in ambiguous exterior or domestic settings. His extraordinary attention to detail, as well as a sense of wartime tension, are evident in "Untitled (Interior with Woman Standing at a Dresser)," 1946, and "Dimensions," ca. 1945–46, his most ambitious drawing from the first half of his career.

Though Foy’s art of the 1940s aligned with Surrealism, the artist preferred to describe his work in terms of “hyper-realism.” This notion of exceeding reality is a key through line uniting his body of work. Foy’s later drawings such as "The White Flower," 1949, and Untitled "(Cluster of Leaves)," ca. 1957, demonstrate his shift away from the human figure to natural motifs, which he favored until the mid-1970s. The artist found inspiration in nature’s transitional and transformative states and explored botanical and ecological subjects with a sense of wonder, inventiveness, and precise delineation.

In the late 1940s, Foy began creating commercial illustrations alongside his independent drawings. A selection of his designs for book jackets, record album covers, and magazine illustrations will be displayed publicly for the first time in this exhibition. Notable examples include his 1958 cover design for Romain Gary’s Lady L. and his 1966 illustration “Perfume: The Secret Garden” for Mademoiselle Magazine. Foy’s work began to taper off in the late 1960s, as he began to subordinate his art to his busy life with his partner Leo Lerman, and by 1975, Foy effectively ceased drawing.