This exhibition centers on the way the human figure is evoked and deconstructed in contemporary painting. Five artists with different backgrounds present works that imagine, form, and deform the human figure, or otherwise allude to the body.
The exhibition borrows its title from the words of Willem de Kooning, who pointed to short moments of insight - each encounter like a flash - that can occur while looking at a painting. The figuration in de Kooning’s work is not something that can be pinned down as an objective fact, rather it resides and is hidden in painterly gestures, color marks, and abstraction. It comes and goes, it is part of the dynamics of perception. This quality can also be found in the works of the five artists participating in the exhibition.
The painters presented, coming from backgrounds across the globe, show quite different temperaments. Yet each of their works harbors a dynamic quality and an understanding of the paradoxical relationship between painting, as a static object on the wall, and reality, in permanent flux. They acknowledge that the complexity of life cannot be grabbed in a single image of a figure, yet it can be evoked in fragments, in flowing relationships, in moments of appearance, in gestures. Together, the artists show a cross section of contemporary painting in which figuration and abstraction have merged.
