NEW BRITAIN New Britain Museum of American Art "NEW/NOW: Fay Ku," figurative, narrative and psychological work exploring the complexities of childhood, using graphite, watercolor and ink.
Influenced by Pop art, commercial and advertising art, and comics, the Imagists created, to varying degrees, works that were figurative, narrative, and surrealistic and that butted against the Modernist abstract and conceptual art then dominating the New York City art scene.
This visual bantering with the painting is what Muñiz wants, for the viewer to revert to the purity of their child-like imaginations and see the possibilities and interactions that co-exist there, to extract from the abstract imagery a figurative narrative that may (or may not) be there.
Eschewing the deadpan neutrality of Richard Estes's cityscapes, the elegance of Robert Cottingham's sign paintings and Chuck Close's inventive ways with process, Mr. Valerio gives large still lifes, interiors and figurative narratives a glowing, slightly hallucinatory vividness.
Researcher and museum curator Margo Neale has described the art of both Bancroft and Morgan as depicting "their relationship to country and family in generally high-keyed works, celebrating and commemorating through personal or collective stories in mainly figurative narratives".
The Silvermine Guild Juried Group Exhibition includes figurative and narrative works in painting, photography, drawing, video and sculpture.
Most of the abstract painting will hold the viewer's attention as much as the figurative and narrative work.
The opposing trend — and of course this opposition could be seen in American painting and music as well as in the dance of the period — was realism, the idea that ballet should deal with the world around us, with sailors and spinsters, fellers and gals, and that it should not be abstract or even ambiguous but forthrightly figurative and narrative.
Key scene: "When she interrupts their literal, and figurative, male narrative and says, 'Can I speak,' that is such an outrageous thing for her to say.
A few months ago, I saw the Alice Neel show in London and, well, just thinking of her work as well -- there is very much a figurative and narrative element to the work, but there is also an element of abstraction in the composition, the shapes and patterns.
Then there is the reading of Giger's work focusing on mythology and psychology, examining the role of individual and collective fears in his approach, which is not merely figurative and narrative but can also be understood in a modern way as the creation of a mythology.
