figuration

Most often, though, these 172 artists showing with 89 exhibitors are taking big swings in lots of directions — severe abstraction, obsessive figuration, decaying sneakers — so that making a list of standouts was nearly impossible.

Well before the current market craze over Black figuration, Thomas was exploring the Black female figure.

“I don’t think it’s possible to have a conversation about figuration without going back to this very fecund moment of Black artistic development.”

But I see these settings – and the characters who inhabit them – as figurations of death.

His sculptures from this time look like whimsical industrial castoffs or colorful yet mangled theatrical masks, toeing the line between objects and bodies, abstraction and figuration.