Hopper Essence (Spanish: Esencia de Edward Hopper) is a staged color photography project by Spanish photographer and visual artist Andres Gallego, developed in 2021–2022 in a small studio in Vila-real (Castellon, Spain) to examine solitary figures and interior life through a Hopper-inspired urban gaze.
Taking Edward Hopper’s 20th-century city imagery as a point of departure, Gallego shifts its concerns to the present—how urban growth can intensify solitude and encourage distant spectatorship. The series frames private rooms as sites where identity loosens from public performance, echoing existential questions about "bad faith" and the self revealed in solitude. It also carries a gendered thread through the recurring presence of his wife, Jessica, as principal model, a structure that recalls Hopper’s own use of Josephine as muse while keeping attention on how women navigate expectation, intimacy, and withdrawal.
Across the photographs, windows, doorways, and thresholds act as literal and psychological borders. Figures appear paused rather than caught mid-action, often arranged in choreographed, frontal spaces that feel both domestic and slightly displaced. A muted palette and measured contrasts hold the scenes in a quiet register, while carefully shaped light—often angled like daylight through a grid of window frames—casts geometric shadows that emphasize stillness and separation. The view beyond the glass becomes a key ambiguity: it reads as environment and projection at once, inviting the viewer to consider what is observed, what is imagined, and what remains inaccessible.
Gallego constructs life-size sets inside his studio and aims to achieve the final image largely in-camera, relying on physical scenography, practical lighting, and performance rather than compositing. Crucially, the exterior vistas visible through windows are hand-painted by the artist in acrylic on canvas, putting painting’s slow construction in direct contact with photography’s instant and producing a hybrid image—what Gallego calls a "metalanguage" between the two.
Hopper Essence was named "Discovery of the Year" at the 2022 Tokyo International Foto Awards and won 1st Place in the Amateur Fine Art category at the 2023 Fine Art Photography Awards. The series has also been exhibited in cities including Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and New York.
