Revealingly, he has limited his selections to representational art, chiefly realist figure paintings by artists like Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers and Philip Pearlstein.
Malinauskas brought them there at a point when they were facing destruction, either deliberately or via neglect; the only Soviet statues left standing in Vilnius are the socialist-realist figures that adorn the four corners of the famous Green Bridge – and they are frequently doused in green paint by nationalist protesters.
Carole Feuerman sculpts triumphant hyper-realist figures of women celebrating their physicality as they move through space, timeless and iconic.
The photo-realist figure paintings of Subba Ghosh, from New Delhi, speak directly about South Asian "otherness" and are in that way closest in spirit to work at the Asia Society.
Of course, as Bartholomew pointed out (above) this is something even the realistic figure painter knows intuitively, as the realist builds the illusion of reality with a mesh of successive abstractions that together compose a resemblance.
Friedman, it turns out, was too nuanced and realist a figure for the modern right, which doesn't do nuance and rejects reality, which has a well-known liberal bias.
There he produced hyper-realist paintings of figures, including self-portraits.
In a letter, the commission said that renderings of the sculpture made Dr. King appear stiff and "confrontational," evoking Socialist Realist statues of political figures recently toppled in other countries.
Jagger takes a realist approach to his figures, embracing detailed images of military power with none of the classical symbolism of other monuments, or even Jagger's own pre-war pieces.
