There's no mistaking the nature of this figure-ground relationship.
Quite a few push the figure-ground relationship in all sorts of very different directions.
For example, he reactivates painting's age-old figure-ground relationship by using actively contrasting techniques that in addition to their general sensuousness are as suggestive as his forms.
Emotionless, silhouetted shapes and the figure-ground relationship they set up are the forte of this figurative painter, whose pared-down work has always related to abstraction.
This reverses the figure-ground relationship of the 1980's design, which imposed the hulking towers symmetrically on axis with Central Park West.
Particularly impressive are his views of the Rodin sculpture, its dark bulk almost an abstraction, forming an interesting figure-ground relationship as it looms against a lighter sky (Glueck).
"What it's all about is the interrelationship of the negative shape – the figure-ground relationship, the shapes between characters and within characters," Parker explained in Gary Hustwit's 2007 documentary, Helvetica.
Most important is the obvious role that the random stains and imperfections of the paper play in the placement of the shapes; what Westerners might call the figure-ground relationship is, to use another art term, highly, even exquisitely site specific, and charged with philosophical implications.
The influence of the Gestalt psychologists is also apparent in works of visual aesthetics; e.g., Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception (1954), which explores the significance for our understanding of pictures of such well-known Gestalt phenomena as the figure-ground relationship and the perception of completed wholes.
During the academic term; point, drawing, pattern bright colors, dull colors, integrating color pairs, figure-ground relationship were the course contents.
