The Figure in Process: From de Kooning to Kapoor, 1955 – 2015: Pivot Art + Culture, Seattle

The human figure is one of the chief foundations of art. Even in those cultures or epochs that have prohibited representation, the figure remains, ironically, conspicuous by its absence. Throughout the West, the modern period has given birth to the most diverse set of artistic attitudes to the figure – spanning a spectrum from the beautiful to the grotesque – in history.

The Figure in Process looks at the exciting ways in which modern and contemporary artists have conceived our presence in the world. Whether dissolved into the landscape, posed before the beholder with formal rigor, elevated to the most monumental proportions or treated with modest intimacy, artists of our time have ceaselessly reinvented the figure. Above all, their diverse treatments of the human condition – whether powerfully embodied in pigment or dematerialized into light and space – reflect a culture that regards existence as rarely fixed but, rather, given to states of ceaseless process.

David Anfam