The Zaragosa and Berlin-based artist is part of a group interested in a "new figurative art" that is more inspired by titans of 20th century Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and Jean-Michel Basquiat than any recent trends.
They created an urbane figurative art and a complex, if undecipherable, written language, one with a suave graphic pizazz when carved in stone, a little like today's bubble-style street graffiti.
By 1960, the starting point of this exhibition, he had made abstraction the setting for a loosely figurative art, painting the thick outlines of nudes, still lifes and rooftops among briskly improvised expanses of bright color.
Of course, nothing in the art world is a done deal, but when an alpha-dealer (Larry Gagosian) and an alpha-curator (Jeffrey Deitch) come together to "collaborate" on a show of figurative art called UNREALISM for Art Basel Miami the tea leaves are there for all of us to read and the reactions are starting to roll in.
On the contrary, Jed Martin moves easily between painting and photography, and manages to make portraits, or history paintings, that have nothing to do with the "losers" who call for a return to figurative art.
It doesn't occur to me to think of this memorial to Blitz firemen as a piece of "figurative art" or even as art at all, but it conjures up an image of this same spot in the blazing nights of the 1940s.
The female body is idealized in a lot of figurative art, but in Detroit-based artist Bronwyn Lorelei's world, these ideals look radically different.
Carrie Able: Currin was at the forefront of a return to figurative art: at the time you would have been hard pressed to find a painting in a NYC gallery let alone a figurative one.
Through September 7 Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 MUponm OurModern ArTimece Upon Our Time After the dominance of abstraction, a resurgence of figurative art setting new paradigms for storytelling to communicate ideas about race, gender, sexuality, history, politics is displayed in sculpture, video, painting, photography, performance.
The manuscript is small, the binding soiled and scuffed, but its lavish illuminations — miniature scenes "as interpreted in the Midrash," created "at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments" — are stunning.
