The works in this section, including many smaller representations of Buddhist divinities in stone and gold and other metals, show that, along with Buddhist beliefs, came what seems a suddenly enhanced skill in figurative representation among Silla's artisans.
Tasks involving discrete units in which figurative representations of units and (to the observer) composite units were provided seemed to elicit a greater variety of written solutions.
"Whether modern fundamentalists like it or not, those figurative representations exist in the hundreds as historic fact," said Barry.
The figures themselves are wild things, self-consciously absurd as figurative representations, oddly cartoon-like in shape, and often near-obliterated by feverishly scribbled mark-making.
In fact, the relief is one of only two existing large, figurative representations from the Old Babylonian period.
If this were the correct identification, it would make the relief (and by implication the smaller plaques of nude, winged goddesses) the only known figurative representations of Ereshkigal.
One gallery was hung with the works of Danie Mellor, a mixed heritage Australian artist who, with figurative representations of colonial period European settlers and Aboriginal natives.
"I just thought it was so different from anything that I had seen because, at the time, so many of the artists of color were working in heavy abstraction or very differently in terms of figurative representation".
Concomitant with the antipathy toward figurative representation in some cultures was a general distaste for the portrayal of all things of the exterior world, animals, landscape features, and other natural forms rarely appearing except as stylized images signifying spiritual forces of good and evil.
The performance kicked off the ambitious 20,0000-square foot Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian exhibition, Unrealism, a massive cross-section of figurative representation in art right now.
