“For me, the great revolt was back to the figure.” – Simon Carr
This group exhibition focuses on the human form in two and three dimensions. Drawings by Ying Li, Simon Carr, Thaddeus Radell and Mark LaRiviere accompany LaRiviere’s figure sculptures, made with a variety of materials including ceramic, gold-leaf painted wood, ultracal and bronze. Through various media and styles—from Li’s vigorous calligraphic markings in charcoal to LaRiviere’s swift, feathery creations in ballpoint pen and Wite-Out—each artist explores the animating possibilities of line, silhouette and surface.
As well as offering these diverse meditations on the human form, this show presents a reunion of four artists who studied fine art at Parsons School of Design in the late 1970s and 1980s: a pivotal moment in post-war American art. The two decades prior saw abstraction at its zenith, while representational art was considered by many to be permanently outmoded. This was especially true in New York City, the birthplace of Abstract Expressionism and home to many of the artists and intellectuals for whom form fundamentally trumped content.
Yet, by the 1970s, there existed a strong current of artists who were seeking ways to reconcile traditional representation with the techniques and insights of abstract art. This movement, termed “painterly representation” by artist and theoretician Louis Finkelstein, was not unique to New York, but many of its champions congregated as teachers at Parsons in the 1970s and 80s, notably Leland Bell, Paul Resika, and Albert Kresch. In the words of art historian Martica Sawin, these artists grappled with: “The attempt…to reconcile subject matter with abstraction or to paint from nature with a strong sense of abstract form… How to exploit the tension between recognizable subject matter and the pure form of Mondrian, and how to make these opposites coincide became the overriding questions that these artists would be pursuing into the next decade, or indeed the rest of their lives.”
All four of the artists featured in this show studied with Bell, Resika and Kresch, and in the work of each, the concerns of this particularly formative era at Parsons are alive and well. “Back to the Figure” (a phrase often-repeated by Bell to his students) offers an opportunity to reconsider this marriage—the possibilities of abstraction coupled with the yearning for narrative—through one of the most essential subjects in the history of art: the human form.