Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York

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 eight painters featured in this show challenged that 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.

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, John Currin (b. 1962) draws on art-historical tropes and genres including portraiture, still life, history painting, and mythology, giving them a distinctly contemporary appearance. As art historian Norman Bryson remarks, Currin’s figurative paintings, 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.”

The atmospheric compositions of Peter Doig (b. 1959) 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 emerge 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.

Following a visit with a group of artists and architects to Le Corbusier’s iconic Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Briey-en-Forêt, France, Doig made a number of paintings based on the classic modernist building between 1991 and 1999. His series refers to the structure as a “Concrete Cabin.”

Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) has continuously probed the complexities of identity and representation in her work. Her paintings and drawings, often 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 boundaries between public and private selves.

The Conspiracy (1994) debuted in the artist’s first exhibition in New York, Not from Here at Jack Tilton Gallery in 1994, which featured paintings of toddlers and young children. Reflecting on this body of work, Dumas wrote, "In a time when we are so aware (or seem to be) of what happens in the world through TV, newspaper and other photobased mediums, painting that refers in one way or another to these issues steps into a whole arena of misunderstanding.... It is however a very exciting place to be in. Because painted human figures remain always imagined beings that have their own peculiar features and psychology.”

Chris Ofili (b. 1968) rose to prominence in the 1990s for his intricate and enigmatic paintings of provocative characters and imagery. Bridging abstraction and figuration, these kaleidoscopic, multilayered works are bedecked with resin, glitter, collage, and, often, elephant dung. Drawn from a range of aesthetic and cultural sources, Ofili's works investigate the intersection of desire, identity, and representation.

On view in Circa 1995 are three of Ofili’s iconic dung paintings, which garnered him critical acclaim and notoriety during the 1990s. These multilayered paintings rest on balls of elephant dung.

Los Angeles–based artist Laura Owens (b. 1970) has pioneered an experimental approach to painting that 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. Her inventive compositions achieve a formal unity while resisting straightforward analysis, renewing the medium of painting by questioning and exploring its master narratives.

Untitled (1997) was exhibited in the major two-part group show Young Americans 2: New American Art at London’s Saatchi Gallery in 1998, which featured fourteen contemporary American artists including Owens, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Lisa Yuskavage, and others. In art historian Roger Bevan’s words, “Together these artists make a weird group that defies categorization” yet found a “common ground” in a “distorted brand of figurative painting.” Young Americans 2 followed the blockbuster Sensation exhibition in 1997.

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, Peyton has been driven by an openness and curiosity that seeks to approach and understand her subjects, and, often, their creative practices.

Martin (1997) depicts London gallerist Martin McGeown, a recurring figure in Peyton’s work during the 1990s. In 1991, McGeown cofounded the experimental gallery Cabinet, which staged a solo exhibition of the artist’s work in 1995.

In this presentation are key paintings by 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 show presented works that incorporated a range of recognizable symbols of American life. The exhibition 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.”

Several of Yuskavage’s standout paintings from the 1990s are on view 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.