Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York @ David Zwirner, New York - John Currin, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, Lisa Yuskavage

Circa 1995: 

New Figuration in New York 

David Zwirner, New York

May 7 – July 17, 2025 

MARLENE DUMAS

The Conspiracy, 1994 

Private Collection.

© Marlene Dumas. Courtesy David Zwirner 

David Zwirner presents Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. The exhibition features eight generation-defining artists who played a central role in the resurgence and expansion of figurative painting during the 1990s: John Currin, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, and Lisa Yuskavage.

By the early 1990s, as photography, film, video, and installation art were taking center stage, painting (and figurative painting in particular) was prematurely dismissed by some as having exhausted its possibilities and contemporary relevance. The artists in this exhibition challenged this notion. Looking to some of the medium’s classic tropes, genres, and techniques while also introducing new subjects, themes, and ideas, these artists redefined what painting could be: their incisive approaches to figuration not only spoke to the moment but also laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of painters. These influential artists have moreover continued to remain uniquely relevant in their ongoing work.

While working in different locations and contexts in the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States, each of these artists showed in New York for the first time in the early to mid-1990s, around the time David Zwirner opened in SoHo in 1993. The works on view here are drawn from key solo shows, including several that were presented at the artists’ respective New York galleries (such as Andrea Rosen Gallery, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Jack Tilton Gallery, and Marianne Boesky Gallery), and point to career-expanding presentations, such as Documenta 9 (1992); Projects 60: John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans (1997), at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the traveling exhibition Sensation (1997–2000), among other important shows from the decade that brought these artists and their radically original work to the forefront. 

Known for his academically rendered canvases and provocative subject matter, American artist JOHN CURRIN (b. 1962) draws on art-historical tropes and genres such as portraiture, still life, history painting, and mythology, giving them a distinctly contemporary appearance. As art historian Norman Bryson remarks, Currin’s figurative works, which are inspired by traditional portraits as well as pinups, pornography, B movies, and women’s magazines, “swerve between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and guilt, joy and shame.” [1] Included in this exhibition are works that debuted in Currin’s critically lauded 1994 and 1997 solo exhibitions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, such as The Cripple and The Bra Shop (both 1997) as well as Ann-Charlotte (1996), which was in the Projects 60 show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997. That presentation, curated by Laura Hoptman, included John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, and Luc Tuymans and signified the resurgence of figurative painting in contemporary art that had been occurring throughout the 1990s.

[1] Norman Bryson, “Maudit: John Currin and Morphology,” in Rose Dergan and Kara Vander Weg, eds., John Currin (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2006), p. 30.

PETER DOIG’s (b. 1959) atmospheric compositions focus predominantly on the figure and landscape. Influenced by his childhood in Trinidad and Canada, his paintings, drawings, and watercolors capture what appear to be familiar moments of tranquility, where abstract and uncanny elements found on the periphery of the urban and natural worlds appear with the dreamlike quality of memory. Referencing a range of art-historical precedents, Doig sources imagery from an archive of materials that includes films, newspapers, album artwork, postcards, and personal photographs. Circa 1995 includes Jetty (1994), which debuted in Doig’s first solo show in New York, at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in 1994, the year Brown opened his eponymous gallery west of SoHo, and which was painted the same year the artist was nominated for the Turner Prize, as well as his Briey (Concrete Cabin) (1994–1996), a canvas from the significant series based on Le Corbusier’s iconic modernist Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Briey-en-Forêt, France.

MARLENE DUMAS (b. 1953) has continuously probed the complexities of identity and representation in her work. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976, where she has since lived and worked. Her paintings and drawings, frequently devoted to depictions of the human form, typically reference a vast archive of source imagery collected by the artist, including art-historical materials, mass media images, and personal snapshots of friends and family. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Dumas’s works reframe and recontextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. Having exhibited widely in Europe since the late 1970s, Marlene Dumas came to broad international attention by the early 1990s with her participation in significant group show such as Documenta 9 (1992), and solo museum presentations, including ones at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia) (1992–1994). On view in Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York is a painting by the artist that appeared in her 1994 solo show Not From Here at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, as well as two other significant paintings from the period.

British artist CHIS OFILI’s (b. 1968) atmospheric, enigmatic paintings investigate the intersection of desire, identity, and representation. Portraying characters from a range of aesthetic and cultural sources through a kaleidoscopic visual mode that bridges abstraction and figuration, his works serve as sites for journeys of creative transformation. On view in Circa 1995 are three of Ofili’s iconic dung paintings, which garnered him both critical acclaim and notoriety during the 1990s. These multilayered paintings, playfully bedecked with resin, glitter, and collage, rest on balls of elephant dung. Among those in the show are Afrodizzia (1996), which presents dazzling, psychedelic patterns of collage and color with balls of dung on its layered surface. Interspersed throughout the composition are magazine cutouts of iconic Black cultural figures. The work was included in the touring exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection—a show that made international headlines in 1999 when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, where The Holy Virgin Mary (1996; collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York), another elephant dung painting by Chis Ofili (not in the present exhibition), was displayed.

Los Angeles–based artist LAURA OWENS’s (b. 1970) experimental approach to painting challenges its material and conceptual limits. Her multilayered works combine diverse interests in folk art, comics, and wallpaper patterns with a broad range of text sources, such as the alphabet and printed media like the Los Angeles Times. Laura Owens incorporates these references into a variety of techniques and media—from traditional oil painting to silkscreening and needlework. Her inventive compositions achieve a formal unity while resisting straightforward analysis, renewing the medium of painting by questioning and exploring its master narratives. Owens’s work often takes the exhibition space into account, indicating the artist’s awareness of the relationship between the object and the viewer. Exhibited in this exhibition are works from Owens’s breakout solo shows from the late 1990s. As critic Roberta Smith noted, reviewing Laura Owens’s 1998 solo exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, “What is beautiful is also funny. The message here is that the medium of painting, which remains above all a surface to be engagingly animated, contains quite a bit of uncharted territory and that the old dog of formalism, unfettered by pure abstraction, can learn all sorts of new tricks.” [2]

[2] Roberta Smith, “Art in Review: Laura Owens,” New York Times, November 6, 1998.

ELIZABETH PEYTON (b. 1965) creates paintings and works on paper that attest to the psychical and emotional depths of her chosen subjects. Throughout her career, whether depicting individuals from historical or contemporary eras, Elizabeth Peyton has been driven by an openness and curiosity that seeks to approach and understand her subjects, and, often, their creative practices. As curator Donatien Grau observes: “Her desire is one for perfection: she makes her paintings into perfect images of life, which are so beautiful and draw you in. But within that desire you can feel the longing: the longing for a life that is gone, or that is going to be gone. You can feel the desire to know—truly know—those individuals.” [3] The exhibition includes paintings that depict the musicians Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher, both important recurring subjects in Peyton’s work during the 1990s, as well as the gallerist Martin McGeown, who staged an exhibition of her work in London in 1995 at his experimental gallery Cabinet.

[3] Donatien Grau, “Fragments on Elizabeth Peyton,” in CLOSE-UP: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton. Exh. cat. (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2021), p. 224.

Belgian artist LUC TUYSMANS’s (b. 1958) deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning. Often rendered in a muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular-media sources. Their quiet and restrained appearance, however, belies an underlying moral complexity that engages equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter. In Circa 1995 are key paintings by Luc Tuymans, including works which debuted in the artist’s 1996 show The Heritage at David Zwirner. Stemming from the artist’s interest in picturing the prevailing mood of uncertainty and loss that he perceived in the United States following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the exhibition presented works that incorporated a range of recognizable symbols of American life and received critical acclaim, including from Peter Schjeldahl, who noted in his Village Voice review: “When I’m looking at Tuymans’s work, it seems to me absurd that our culture doesn’t embrace painting normally and avidly, as an enthusiastic matter of course.” [4] 

[4] Peter Schjeldahl, “Bad Thoughts: Luc Tuymans,” Village Voice, October 8, 1996, p. 86.

In her work, American artist LISA YUSKAVAGE (b. 1962) affirms the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. Her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements in which color and light are the primary vehicles of meaning. Several of Yuskavage’s standout paintings from the 1990s are presented in the exhibition, including works from her Bad Babies series (1991–1992), which the artist has described as “portraits of beings in color” and feature individual female figures seen from the knees up set against jewel-tone monochromatic fields of color. The Bad Babies, a breakthrough series of four works, was first shown together in Yuskavage’s second solo exhibition in New York, at Elizabeth Koury in 1993. Likewise, Big Little Laura (1998), another seminal painting from this decade, was first shown in New York in 1998 at Marianne Boesky Gallery. As Peter Schjeldahl wrote, again in The Village Voice, in praise of the works in that exhibition, “Remember when contemporary art was an adventure? With the likes of Yuskavage around, it is adventurous again.” [5]

[5] Peter Schjeldahl, “Purple Nipple,” Village Voice, September 29, 1998, p. 138.

DAVID ZWIRNER 

537 West 20th Street, New York City 

www.davidzwirner.com

Rear View Exhibition @ LGDR Gallery, NYC

Rear View

LGDR Gallery, New York

April 18 - June 1, 2023

WORKS BY Francis Bacon, Seth Becker, Fernando Botero, Cecily Brown, Paul Cadmus, Miriam Cahn, Harry Callahan, Jordan Casteel, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Diane Dal-Pra, Giorgio de Chirico, Edgar Degas, Urs Fischer, Eric Fischl, Jared French, Lucian Freud, Domenico Gnoli, Jenna Gribbon, Barkley L. Hendricks, Anselm Kiefer, Gustav Klimt, René Magritte, Aristide Maillol, Danielle Mckinney, Yoko Ono, Philip Pearlstein, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Larry Rivers, Jenny Saville, Egon Schiele, Pavel Tchelitchew, Mickalene Thomas, Félix Vallotton, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems, Issy Wood

Félix Vallotton 

Étude de fesses, c. 1884 

Oil on canvas, 14¹⁵⁄16 × 18⅛ inches (38 × 46 cm) 

Photo © Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne

John Currin 

Nude in a Convex Mirror, 2015 

Oil on canvas, Diameter: 42 inches (106.7 cm)

Private Collection, Aspen 

© John Currin. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Barkley L. Hendricks 

Pat’s Back, 1968 

Oil on canvas, 601/4 × 601/4 inches (153 × 153 cm). Private Collection

© Barkley L. Hendricks 

Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks 

and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems 

Untitled (Woman Standing Before Commercial Billboard), 2003 

Pigment ink print, 20 × 20 inches (50.8 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 5, with 2 AP 

© Carrie Mae Weems 

Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Spanning two floors of LGDR’s landmark Beaux-Arts-style townhouse, Rear View presents a transhistorical selection of over sixty paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photographs that explore representation of the human figure as seen from behind—an enduring, wide-ranging paradigm that has exerted potent influence upon modern and contemporary artists. In addition to rare twentieth-century masterworks by Félix Vallotton, Edgar Degas, René Magritte, Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele, Paul Cadmus, Aristide Maillol, and others, Rear View brings together seminal works by a diverse group of living artists spanning generations.

Long before the term Rückenfigur was popularized in the nineteenth century by Caspar David Friedrich, painters and sculptors from as far back as antiquity deployed the human figure seen from behind as a conceptual and formal device. Rear View provides a lens onto this specific genre as it pertains to artists’ desire to capture a range of human states and emotions—contemplation, longing, voyeurism, refusal, fetishism, and defiance—while drawing our attention to the act of looking itself and to the viewer’s role in constructing meaning and identity.

Many contemporary artists have engaged the Rückenfigur trope, deliberately harnessing its critical potential. In one of the most compelling examples, Carrie Mae Weems has photographed herself in canonical landscapes and charged historical sites over many years, as a means of addressing complex issues around race, gender, and class, while also subjecting the signature paradigm of Romanticism to radical, politicized revision.

From the idealized bodies celebrated in Hellenistic sculpture to the bathers glimpsed in snapshot-like paintings and drawings by Impressionists and early modernists, images of nude bodies portrayed from behind have been integral to the unfolding story of figuration in the West. Urs Fischer directly quotes the Classical origins of this art historical paradigm in a monumental new candle sculpture made specifically for Rear View. Divine Interventions (2023) reprises one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roman marble Three Graces (second century CE), turning the trio of iconic feminine paragons, Aglaia (Beauty), Euphrosyne (Mirth), and Thalia (Abundance), into ephemeral forms cast in wax. Admiring this sculptural group—and in essence joining the Graces—is a wax effigy of Pauline Karpidas, the legendary contemporary art patron who once owned the ancient work that the Met would come to acquire.

The eroticism of “rear view” images emerges not only from the frisson of nudity—the iconography of the human derrière emerges as a whole transhistorical subject onto itself—but from the narrative implication of intimacy between the depicted subject and the artist, the viewer’s fantasizing gaze and the sensuousness of the image on canvas. The trope of the mirror, the ritual of bathing, and the lounging or sleeping body are typical rear view scenarios taken up by artists across the centuries—from Edgar Degas to René Magritte, from Félix Vallotton to Barkley L. Hendricks, through to our present day. Fernando Botero’s painting The Bathroom (1989) features a woman, at once monumental and delicate, gazing at herself in the mirror, wearing only heels and a headband. The figure’s unselfconscious posture suggests she is unaware of the artist, invested only in herself

By contrast, John Currin’s Nude in a Convex Mirror (2015) looks over her shoulder, presumably at the painter who is depicting the curves of her accentuated buttocks—but also at the viewer observing the action. The subject of Paul Cadmus’s c. 1965 crayon drawing Standing Male Nude (NM 48) likewise peeks over his shoulder at the artist and the viewer, but with a loaded glance and flirtatious pose—one foot ever so slightly lifted to reveal its sole—that encode a sexual charge of mutual male gazes into an otherwise classical image. Jared French, who was part of the homosocial circle of artists around Cadmus, are represented in the exhibition by emblematic, dreamlike paintings populated uniquely by idealized male figures. The performative signifiers of masculinity emerge as an important subtheme of Rear View, evident in Giorgio de Chirico’s hyper-stylized Gladiatori (1928), Francis Bacon’s tormented figure in Study for Portrait of John Edwards (1986), and Andy Warhol’s abstracted depiction of a butch man’s hind quarters.

In their foreclosure of a complete picture, turned figures such as Currin’s nude also signal fetishism, another theme explored in Rear View. A number of works in the exhibition illuminate ways in which contemporary painting has absorbed the cinematic motif of the rear view, translating the camerawork of film noir and Hitchcockian thrillers like Rear Window (1954) into paint on canvas or rich black-and-white photographic images. Eric Fischl and Danielle Mckinney, for example, draw upon our collective cinematic imagination in composing their deeply narrative scenes, often populated by mysterious figures shown from the back and seemingly unaware of being observed. By contrast, but with no less enigmatic intensity, Harry Callahan’s mid-century rear-view photographs of his beloved wife, Eleanor, testify to the impact of cinematic vision when personalized to a single, deceptively simple subject.

In this context, another thematic trope of Rear View manifests in the work of Edgar Degas. Second only to his images of ballet dances, Degas’s voyeuristic bathing scenes dominate his vast oeuvre. On view in the exhibition, the artist’s delicate 1889–92 pastel Femme se peignant depicts a young nude female, seen from behind, combing her raven-colored tresses over her head. Degas’s scopophilic gaze focuses on the model’s flowing mane—a visual and psychological effect echoed by Domenico Gnoli’s sumptuous large-scale canvas Curly Red Hair (1969), which lingers over the texture of auburn curls cascading down a woman’s back. Tightly cropped to the subject at hand and denying the identifying details of the figure, this painting reveals Gnoli’s seeming uninterest in the body, except as a support for signifying ornament.

The fragmented, fetishized human body emerged as a loaded trope in art history, according to esteemed feminist scholar Linda Nochlin in her study The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (1994). Spurred by the violence and social upheaval of the French Revolution, Nochlin notes, artists began to systematically deploy radical spatial cropping as well as isolating specific body parts, in order to explore the specific conditions of modern urban life—alienation, desire, suffering, obsession, ambiguous anonymous experiences. Nochlin’s observations find a contemporary echo in Issy Wood’s intimate canvas on view in the exhibition: Health and hotness (2018) shows only the muscular back and bottom of a swimmer framed by her purple bathing suit. Wood’s enigmatic image is also a meditation on the impact of compressed and splitting planes and shapes—a study of the body as an abstraction.

Political refusal and personal irreverence also figure into art historical manifestations of the rear view. Six photographs from Anselm Kiefer’s polemical 1969 series Occupations (Besetzungen) take up this political mantle. In this series, the young artist photographed himself—often shown from behind, mimicking the heroic stance of Friedrich’s Rückenfigur—performing the Nazi salute in front of European monuments and natural sites. Of the series, controversial then as now, art historian Benjamin Buchloh remarked that it is “a real working through of German history. You have to inhabit it to overcome it.”

“String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace.” This is how Yoko Ono described her infamous Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–67)—an 80-minute montage of 365 human bottoms, featuring different genders, races, and body types. Marshaling her conceptual Fluxus rigor and sly humor into a powerful political protest against the Vietnam War, Ono’s provocative film retains its antiwar bite as well as its universalizing humanism today. In the diptych that Francesco Clemente created for Rear View, Gold on Green, Green on Gold (2023), the artist slyly questions the front/back logic that underpins the exhibition as well as the binary thinking that governs so much of Western culture. Using gold leaf and a radically reduced palette, Francesco Clemente portrays ambiguous, gender-indeterminate figures that appear to be engaged in oral sex. The artist muses, “Maybe our mistaken ideas—based on duality, based on ‘us against them’—begin with the fact that we can only see half of what there is. We can only face one direction. We feel incomplete because we can never see completely ourselves. Painting may repair that, offering a vision of totality.”

LGDR

19 East 64 Street, New York, NY 10065

lgdr.com

John Currin, Des Moines Art Center - Works on Paper

John Currin: Works on Paper
Des Moines Art Center
February 13, 2003 - April 27, 2003

The Des Moines Art Center presents John Currin: Works on Paper, the first museum exhibition to focus on the drawings of John Currin. 

Chosen with the artist’s participation, this important exhibition features a selection of 30 drawings that presents an overview of John Currin’s work in the medium from 1990 until the present. John Currin’s drawings allude to art history, but also respond to contemporary sensibilities. Among other sources, he references the art of the Renaissance, Italian Mannerism, French Rococo, and popular illustration. Humor, absurdity, and technical virtuosity mark the artwork. Often sexually charged, but always psychologically jarring, John Currin’s work points the way for a new mode of realism in contemporary art.

John Currin’s drawings are frequently preliminary sketches for paintings, as seen in Three Friends, 1998, or they function as exercises to resolve compositional problems and to enhance skills. Many are refined and complete works of art; others are obviously gestural and quickly done. As such, the drawings illuminate the artist’s decision-making processes and provide documentation of his creative method. All of the drawings focus on depictions of people in a variety of circumstances; they are about sexuality, human emotions, and observing the nuances of character. The work has an air of artificiality, but real emotions survive in spite of the affectedness. John Currin describes his art as mixing a “celestial sweetness with a dark terror.”

Following its premiere in Des Moines, the exhibition can be seen at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado, from June 6, 2003 – September 7, 2003.

Funding for John Currin: Works on Paper was provided by the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and the Corporate Council through the Major Exhibition Fund.

DES MOINES ART CENTER

4700 Grand Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa 50312

www.desmoinesartcenter.org