The New Figuration

The New Figuration Curated by Glenn Adamson

FRIEDMAN BENDA 515 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10011

The New Figuration

by Glenn Adamson Look across the territory of modern design, and you’ll struggle to find much in which you recognize yourself – a thing with a head and feet, that is, and all the parts in between. This ought to be surprising. After all, chairs are routinely described as having arms and legs, a back and a seat. Look further back in history than the twentieth century, and you’ll find figurative elements everywhere. True, many of these motifs are drawn from the animal kingdom: tables wrought in the shape of eagles, wings outspread; feet neatly carved with birdlike claws. But look around a bit, and you’ll also find furniture that is populated with muscled allegorical figures, and caryatids, pressed into permanent servitude as columns, and even (for a brief moment in the eighteenth century) tea tables fitted with stockings and buckled shoes.

As an imaginative adjunct to the designerly arts, figuration more or less died off in the 20th century. It’s a whodunit with an obvious perpetrator: modernism, which erupted in design with the force of revelation, just as it did in painting, sculpture and architecture. Rationalism, as it was called at the time, was as much of a head game as that name implies. Its logic was literally disembodied: the goal was to make machines for living with. That objective was every bit as extreme as the challenge that abstractionists brought to traditional painting, with an additional aggressive energy, given that designers wanted to radically transform people’s most private spaces.

Human qualities did still remain in these programmatic objects. The materials of a leather-upholstered tubular steel chair, if you think about it, correlate strongly to skin, flesh and bone. But that’s the thing: you do have to think about it. In this design, human qualities are subsumed into exercises of technical research and pure form.

This orthodoxy was never as complete as our textbooks sometimes imply, of course. Outside the historical precincts of modernism, there are bodies buried here and there: the sensual Art Deco of André Groult, as in his Chiffonnier Antrophomorphe (1925); Salvador Dali’s Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936), one of many figural operations that the Surrealists performed; and still further afield, the designs of the anthroposophists, who employed figuration as a way to externalize the mental landscape.

These singular examples aside, though, there was also one moment in the 20th century when figuration came truly into vogue. This was in the late 1960s, the era of the Hippie counterculture, which viewed the body (as it viewed everything) in liberated, visionary terms. Independent makers set about applying this esprit de corps to their work, and in 1966, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts put a name to the phenomenon: Fantasy Furniture.

The show included the carved wood psychedelia of Mexico’s Pedro Friedeberg, the slapstick neo-Surrealism of Tommy Simpson, and the organic designs of Wendell Castle. Figuration was a perfect fit for this group for exactly the same reasons it was rejected by the modernists: it was the ideal showcase for intuitive design and skilled handwork.

The ‘60s were also, of course, the moment when Pop art and design burst on to the scene. Inasmuch as it sought to meet users (and consumers) more than halfway, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Pop’s vocabulary often included human figures in part – as in Pierre Paulin’s Tongue chair (1967) and Studio 65’s Bocce (Lips) sofa (1972), itself a nod back to Dalí – or in whole, as in the unsettling, fetishistic furniture of British artist Allen Jones.

As these examples suggest, a blithe notion of sex appeal, thoroughly unacquainted with incipient feminism, was the order of the day. This was the problematic context in which Gaetano Pesce, an avatar of figurative design ever since, created his iconic Up 5 (1969), an inflatable foam chair in the shape of a voluptuous woman. He has always insisted that this was a protest against misogyny – hence its accompanying round ottoman, the Up 6, representing a ball and chain. It seems likely, however, that most observers mistakenly regarded his initial foray into figuration as simply another in Pop’s entertaining cast of characters, a reading encouraged by Pesce’s Up 7, shaped like a gigantic bare foot.

It’s also too little appreciated that, even prior to the rise of the Feminist movement in the early 1970s, women artists operating in a Pop idiom were offering an important counternarrative to what was happening in design.

In 1967 at the Judson Gallery in New York, Kate Millett, soon to publish her landmark book Sexual Politics,

presented her own works of “fantasy furniture”, absurdist while convincingly evoking the psychological dimensions of domesticity. In this respect they bear comparison with Pop-inflected creations of her fellow New York artist Marisol, who didn’t make furniture per se but did employ the technical repertoire of cabinetmaking in her sculptures, even incorporating pieces of chairs and tables in her portrayals of seated figures. Over in France, Nicola L. created brilliant satires at the intersection of objects and objectification – in her La Femme Commode (1969), the figure’s eyes, mouth, nipples, navel and genitals are transformed into drawer pulls – while Niki de Saint Phalle, occasionally made furniture as part of her broader project of joyous self-empowerment.

As quickly as Pop came, it went, leaving questions about the relation between gender and furniture unresolved.

Incredibly, a full half-century has ensued since, without sustained investigation of figuration and its possibilities.

The body was central to a new area of design thinking in the 1970s, ergonomics; but that was a neo-modernist project, its dominant metaphor still that of the machine, now calibrated to operate quasi-scientifically upon the user. Postmodernism, that most permissive of design movements, could well have incorporated figurative iconography into its repertoire. But it didn’t, apart from a few tongue-in-cheek product designs by Alessandro Mendini, some of Michael Graves’ commissions for Disney, and the funny little guy hidden at the top of Ettore Sottsass’s Carlton bookcase. Overlapping trends like high-tech and creative salvage, given their emphasis on materiality, were even less apt to engage with figuration, and the same was true of the Dutch-led conceptual turn of the 1990s.

Even in the 21st century so far, a wide-open period in design history, mobilizations of organic form have tended to be more metaphorical than iconographic. This is all the more striking because the field’s technical repertoire has developing so robustly. With decades of innovation in technology and production strategy behind them, independent designers are able to make unprecedentedly complex sculptural forms and articulated surfaces.

The conditions required to make ambitious figuration have been there. But it’s only very recently that designers are embracing figuration as a modus operandi. They have done so totally independently of one another; this is a zeitgeist, not a movement. The present exhibition features seven of these designers, most of them just establishing their careers. They are far-flung both geographically – from the USA to several corners of Europe to China – and aesthetically, working across a range of materials and aesthetics. Even so, their near-simultaneous arrival suggests something quite particular is going on.

So: why figuration, and why now? To begin with the obvious, we are living through a period of rampant self-representation. It’s the era of the selfie and the profile, genres now implicated in the most essential of social activities, from internet dating to gig economy employment. When cultivating such pseudo-persona, difficult questions invariably arise: How honest should I be about myself - how much should I disclose? What makes me unique, desirable, admirable? Who, in fact, am I? Faced with such posers – and outfitted with an ever-expanding arsenal of tools to explore them – we become, inexorably, poseurs, constructing shape-shifting avatars rather than literalist self-portraits.

Painters and sculptors have been working through these questions about the virtual for years, now, and one way we could understand the figural turn in design is, simply, as a response to what’s been happening more broadly in the visual arts. This is quite a complicated story, though, because the figure never had the disappearing act in these other disciplines that it did in design. It’s been more of a love/hate story, with figurative modes generally occupying a less theoretically authorized position than the linked modalities of formalism and conceptualism, with their supposedly superior rigor. Today, however, figuration is all but dominant in contemporary painting and sculpture. They have reclaimed their historic roles as vehicles for expressing subjective experience.

It’s telling that Black artists have been among the primary protagonists of this renewal – Kerry James Marshall, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sherald, Michael Armitage, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Simone Leigh, to name just a few – signaling the importance of figurative painting in the expression of long-marginalized voices. No term is more politicized, nowadays, than “identity.” On the one hand, in keeping with our online representations, there’s an increasing appreciation of the self as a fluid domain, and identity as something performed rather than inherent.

On the other hand, a dominant theme in cultural debate is the power (and too often, the violence) to which the

racialized, gendered self is subjected. Phrases like “Black and Brown bodies” and “my body, my choice” have become incantatory refrains. These two ideas – that identity is malleable, and that it’s an impervious barrier between worldviews – aren’t necessarily in outright contradiction. But it certainly makes for a complicated picture.

The body (to adapt a line from Barbara Kruger) is increasingly perceived as a battleground, where coercion and liberation contend.

The new figurative design constitutes an unusual instance of the field responding directly to prevailing trajectories in fine art. Just as in contemporary figurative painting and sculpture, design is being used to probe identity, and staging highly-charged face-to-face encounters. Yet functional objects also have their own particular dynamics. Even at the fundamental level of engineering, a designer working with figuration must negotiate questions that wouldn’t otherwise arise. Should a chair’s legs and arms actually be shaped like legs and arms, or should the mimetic relation to a body be more elastic? How best to integrate elements that do not have a figurative correlate, like doors and tabletops? Then there is the critical question of function: how a real-world body will engage with the one manifested in the object. Perhaps taking it by the hand, or even sitting in its lap?

As these potential affordances begin to suggest, figurative design also has a unique capacity to sustain narrative. The object may tell its own short story, or serve as a focal point within a larger project of imaginative worldbuilding. It’s worth noticing that none of the works in this show is particularly naturalistic, much less hyper-realist.

As in comics, movies, and video games – the visual culture on which this generation of designers was raised – the bodies are morphed, altered, hybridized. There’s a sense that anything can happen. In a curious way, this extreme creative license opens a backdoor to abstraction. Color and composition, two of the primary factors in any abstract form, are treated with total freedom in the new figurative work. Mimesis may be an animating premise, but it’s held in dialogue with purely geometric and gestural considerations. This dialectic resolves itself as stylization, another despised term in modernist design theory, here allowed to run riot. The exhibition is a pageant of theatrical sensibility, with the objects’ abstract traits expressing individuality in a manner akin to clothing, hairstyle, and personal demeanor.

This sort of personification introduces a whole new expressive realm; furniture can be comic, melancholy, and enraged. Above all, figurative design invites us to wonder who an object is meant to represent, as well as what.

This marks a delayed engagement with the work of artists like Marisol and Nicola L., who seem premonitory in retrospect. What they were exploring a half-century ago returns now in design, in a fiercely updated fashion.

Several of the artists here render the female-coded body in uncompromisingly subjective fashion, a thunderous clapback against stereotype. Given that the field of professional design is still nowhere near gender parity, the collective feminist force of these works may well be the most significant aspect of the new figuration.

Another way to think about the potency of these objects is to consider their totemic quality. Again, this is a tendency that appears in contemporary sculpture (think of Huma Bhabha, for example), but it has special resonance in design because of the object’s implied insertion into everyday life. The totem can be understood, in this context, as a symbolic artifact in which social and spiritual energies are compressed. It’s a means by which a community represents itself, to itself. The most ancient of sculptural types, it also feels urgent – even futuristic – in that it offers a potential bridge between the subjective and the universal. I’ve noted several times, in this essay, the emphasis on individualism that informs the current figurative impulse. It’s also clear, however, that we need to find alternatives to that intense first-person perspective. Taken to extremes – the atomization and alienation that we see everywhere nowadays, both online and off – it threatens to tear the social fabric, producing various configurations of us vs. them. We badly need things to believe in, together.

This is a lot to expect from our furniture. But as we’ve seen, figurative design is not happening in isolation. It is one current in a gathering wave, which is sweeping aside long-stable hierarchies of value. That sounds portentous, and the new figuration is certainly not asking anyone’s permission. Having crashed the well-kept gates, though, the energy it’s bringing is overwhelmingly positive. As we have worked toward this exhibition, seeing the work in progress – all these objects coming gradually to life – it’s been possible to discern the project’s contours. What it looks like, more than anything, is a party starting. And this time, everyone is invited.

Toomas Toomepuu [American, b. 1995] Call of the Void (detail), 2022

Alison Gingeras interviewed by Glenn Adamson GA: I’d like to begin with a line from your 2002 exhibition at the Pompidou, Dear Painter, Paint Me. In the catalog for that project, which remains an essential reference for this whole subject area, you wrote, “artists are willfully enlisting latent cultural guilt attached to the stylistic codes of figurative painting, in order to harness its antagonistic effect.” The obvious questions would be: why cultural guilt? And how did that enable an antagonistic, or critical, aspect to figuration at that time?

AG: When I organized Dear Painter, I was interested not only in surveying the surprising emergence of figurative artists that came to prominence at the end of the 1990s, but also in understanding how over the twentieth century there was a deliberate antagonism in the choice to make figurative art at specific historical junctures. I was interested in creating a genealogy. And I tried to do that in a somewhat artificial, speculative manner by looking at the postwar period, starting with late work of Francis Picabia, who during the war was making these shocking, very kitsch nudes. It was later discovered that those previously deemed “retrograde” paintings were based on soft-pornographic magazines. Picabia was in part responding to the effects of mass media. There was a strange criticality, there. In wartime when everyone was marshaling gestures of the avant-garde as a form of refusal, Picabia chose a language that he knew would irritate the consensus. He wasn’t using Picasso’s language. He was using a language from a taboo source, and layering on top of it a knowing provocation, poking the bear of good taste.

From there, I looked decade by decade to see other artists who similarly were going against the grain of styles of figuration that were intellectually sanctioned. In the fifties, I landed on Bernard Buffet: particularly in the French context, a real salt-in-the-wound gesture. But it was also valid: he was painting what it was like to live in the rubble of the war, and certainly capturing an emotional atmosphere, but not with the abstraction of Jean Fautrier or Wols. This is an underlying theme that, I think, relates to your project: what is this consensus that figuration pushes back against, at different moments in time?

In the 1980s, Martin Kippenberger was poking that same bear when he commissioned a poster painter to make the Dear Painter, Paint Me series. Not only was this Pop-like movie poster figuration, but also removing his hand through outsourcing. At the time I was having a hangover from the Whitney Independent Study Program and Columbia grad school, where I was a student of Benjamin Buchloh. I had been conditioned to a certain thinking about the correct neo-avant-garde position. It was just assumed that anything figurative was automatically anti-intellectual, anything narrative automatically retrograde. And I intuitively wanted to interrogate those blanket judgements.

GA: I’m so interested to learn of your personal connection with Buchloh. His essay in October, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” is perhaps the most well-known expression of the anti-figurative position. It’s one of those strange texts that is widely cited, but usually in a spirit of appalled objection. It circulates as an example of theory overstepping its natural province and becoming prescriptive – ironically, an authoritarian project in its own right. I would be very interested to hear you talk about how a theorist of his obvious intelligence could have formed such a position. What was the intellectual framework that made his degree of anti-figurative sentiment possible in the first place?

AG: Well, he came out of the Frankfurt School, Marxist context. I have to say that I absolutely respect Benjamin; there was a productive antagonism being his student. When I was in his graduate seminar at Columbia, he really relished these kinds of conversations. He wasn’t an ideologue, in fact he encouraged vigorous debate. And there were cases that broke his prescriptions of the neo avant-garde – Sigmar Polke for example, who didn’t have an ideological program. On the contrary, he was an anarchist, and his absolutely heterogeneous approach to art making oscillated between experimental abstraction, conceptual performance, film, photography, alchemy and figuration.

As for myself, I just felt that there was a generational shift happening. ‘What does it mean to be critical?’ That was the big bugbear for our generation. No one cares about this anymore, but when I was in the Whitney program, we used to spend hours having debates about models of criticality that weren’t based in negation, which – to oversimplify – was what the October school was all about. Whereas I wanted to see critical possibility in, let’s say, the work of Jeff Koons or Kippenberger, or even Warhol. This was a philosophical model based on affirmation, drawing from Nietzsche and Deleuze, which holds that culture is not dialectical, as it was understood to be in Frankfurt School thinking.

GA: When you speak of a methodology of affirmation, I wonder whether you see precedents in feminism and queer activism. The détournement of pornography that you see in Picabia, and his flirtation with kitsch, remind me of Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” and many subsequent moves that were made in queer discourse and 1970s feminism as well.

AG: Absolutely. And even the feminists that fell outside of the orthodoxy - all those artists that didn’t get their due, and were even censored by other feminists because they embraced phallic imagery and explicit sexual imagery. As always, the theory comes after the art.

Warhol is actually a similar case: there is supposed to be a good Warhol, pre-“business art,” prelapsarian; and a bad Warhol, affirmative of capitalism, and that’s garbage. But for me, the garbage is the best part of Warhol. All this has to do with an intersectional understanding that has emerged, because of different disciplines and methodologies that are joining together: queer studies and feminisms, psychoanalysis, models that are not based purely on a Frankfurt school approach. Culture is so unwieldy, and we want our artists to be unwieldy too. They have all these have tools, figuration being one of them, and they don’t always have the same effect. At different moments, there are peak moments of figuration’s antagonistic power. And then there are moments like right now, where it’s so saturated in the market that it becomes hard to retain that antagonistic edge. It’s omnipresent.

Just as with abstraction, it is effective at different moments.

GA: From my point of view, seeing figuration enter design is just such a moment of potential disruption, because it hasn’t been present in the conversation. Even though it is saturated in the fine art domain, in design, it feels like an insurrectionary maneuver. But let me ask you another question about the recent embrace of figuration, which has to do with identity politics. You just used the term “intersectional,” which has become a placeholder for a complex range of thought about the nature of identity in a post-postmodern condition. It seems to me that surely there is a correlation between the currency of figuration, on the one hand, and that rethinking of identity as multiple, contingent, fluid, and also chosen or self-selected – not simply inherited, given, or fixed.

AG: Yes. I’m working on an implicit sequel to Dear Painter that examines the politics of representation. This is perhaps the one domain of fine art where figuration still has potential, because it’s not about the simple act of transgression. There is a consensus that John Currin’s paintings of ladies with big boobs are no longer transgressive. But if we look back at the twentieth century again, we find figurative artists who were representing themselves in ways that are surprising and quite timely in terms of our current moment. Think of Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, in the early 1910s, who made self-portraits performing his Japanese-ness for the avant-garde circles in Paris. He was purposefully overdoing it, with his haircut and his glasses, in his Japanese finery. Or Robert Colescott, who was not only foregrounding Black figurative subject matter, but probing questions of sexuality and interracial desire in really provocative ways. So I think there is another genealogy there.

GA: I wonder if the reason that figuration still feels like it has so much potential is because it opens up a domain of non-art concerns to art, in a way that nothing else does. Figuration allows you to explore aspects of everyday, private life, and crucially, to communicate those realities to a broad public. I think here of Kerry James Marshall.

His audience is not necessarily seeking him out for theoretical reasons; it’s a much larger social canvas that he’s painting on. As a vehicle of content, figuration simply has opportunities that other modes of art making don’t.

AG: I agree with you—narrative is key. Visual storytelling is vital when it comes to the political impact of this work.

Again, going back to the latent guilt that simple narratives have: history painting was considered a dead genre, obsolete. But it’s become more important than ever because it’s about giving voice and agency. I think about this younger artist, Umar Rashid, who creates a speculative history reinserting Black and Brown people into what he calls the “Franglish,” that is the French and English empire. It’s a revisionist imaginary history of America.

That’s an important form of agency – we’re no longer just debating European and white male artists of the avantgarde, with the occasional woman thrown in. A much more diverse field of artists are now getting attention. It’s great that these hierarchies are getting abolished, it’s a social revolution about identity.

On the other hand, I marvel at how so much vocabulary that really comes out of our field has been usurped by marketing. Today, we live in an internet-based image world. We see how territorializations and de-territorializations and appropriations are happening in real time. That’s a huge transformation that’s taken place over twenty years.

GA: I suppose the easily appropriated nature of art’s storytelling capacities was the essence of Buchloh’s objection to figuration. That was precisely why he was committed to a strategy of negation. But it does seem like that position didn’t factor in diversity and multiplicity, the polyvocality and anti-hierarchical nature of art’s potential social impact.

AG: It’s also a class thing, isn’t it? The accessibility of the story defies the rarified strategies of Marxist abstraction. Of course, I’m drawing a cartoon here to make a point, but those strategies, one could argue, have been usurped as well. Is there anything that mass culture hasn’t appropriated, colonized and used?

GA: This brings us to design. Having the utmost respect for your integrity as a non-specialist on the topic, I do want to ask for your thoughts on what happens when figuration moves into the domain of functional objects.

One thing that comes to my mind is that a functional object affords different possibilities for narrative, because it can play out through interaction, for example, or simply by inhabiting a home or other space in a way that exerts a constant psychological presence. I wonder how it looks to you though: this move to design as an additional pathway for figuration?

AG: It does seem analogous to that turn-of-the-millennium moment. There’s an obvious transgression of style, restraint, and taste. One of the younger designers who I know personally is Katie Stout; the way she uses figuration collapses the divide between sculpture and functional design. I think very much about pleasure. And play.

Serious design or serious sculpture are not supposed to have that, but then there is once again a twentieth-century genealogy, the homo ludens of CoBrA for example. And it’s interesting that it’s now seeming to come back, not in a tiny corner of the avant-garde, but bubbling up in a broader, even accessible way.

GA: That makes me think about Surrealism, and its place in this conversation. Picabia himself was at least Surrealism-adjacent. It seems to me that the playful, pleasurable aspect of this work relates to what another generation of critics or art historians might have seen as the “bad” Surrealism, an irrational, even slapstick relationship to desire. That seems to be a strain of the work that we’re seeing coming out of the design world as well, in parallel with what’s happening in painting.

AG: That sounds right. I think one of the things that the recent show at the Metropolitan really gets wrong is that it adheres too closely to the chronology of the “good” early Surrealism. It didn’t explain that it was because of the prejudice against postwar Surrealism that a lot of women artists were left out of the canon, or take into account the proliferation of that language in different regions of the world, where Surrealism became a vital tool, like Eastern Europe. There’s still a lot of policing of when certain artistic tools or styles are allowed, or not allowed. But to my mind, good artists are always attracted to some antagonistic potential. So maybe these younger designers are sensing that this is an area where we haven’t gone. Unleashing the so-called “bad” Surrealism at the right time is the best antagonistic gesture.

GA: Let me ask you one last question, which is about you and your practice. I hear what you’re saying about a non-police-state version of art criticism and art curation. But it does raise the question of what a curator is doing.

Just letting things into the story or not, could be seen as a form of policing, if only in a minimal way. In an attention economy, where do you shine your spotlight? You’re always blocking things out as well as letting things in.

Given this, how do you think of your own curatorial practice?

AG: It’s not an easy question. I feel like a kindred spirit to someone like Robert Rosenblum, who was an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century specialist, but had catholic tastes. If he was interested in something, especially something contemporary, he allowed himself the intellectual freedom to probe it, if it was good, whatever good means. I guess that’s what it is: is there enough to fit into whatever value system you operate on, whether it’s aesthetic, political, or intellectual? I have really come to embrace that curiosity, while trying to keep a certain amount of rigor. When you do a show or write an essay, to me, it’s always an argument. It may be revisionist or historical, and you are asserting one artist over another. That’s what Dear Painter was all about. I was so much younger, and green, but I looked at every possible artist that I had knowledge of, and tried to make choices.

Again, it’s about storytelling. What’s the most effective way to make this case? I don’t think that’s necessarily a model that can be applied to every subject. But I think each exhibition has its own structure – and maybe I actually learned that from Benjamin Buchloh. Dear Painter came out of that essay of his. It was a response, a counter-argument.

GA: That suggests that the curatorial act for you is itself affirmative rather than negative: not policing, but rather giving life to something that has its own integrity and its own rationale, its own reason for being.

AG: Yes. And over time, I realized that I didn’t want to fight those old battles about the worst of Warhol, or Kippenberger. It had felt transgressive as a young woman to be really into these “bad boys.” But then I forced myself to look at other genres, and other groups of artists. I hadn’t really written that much about women artists, and I wanted to drill down feminist art history or look at the geopolitical margins of the Western cannon. What’s missing from art history’s orthodoxies? What’s been repressed and why?

GA: I suppose this curiosity across genre accounts for your interest in having had this very conversation. So, let me just thank you for doing that, and engaging with this project.

Go to the website of Anna Aagaard Jensen, and you’ll be confronted with a montage. It begins, pointedly, with Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who is seated across from Stephen Colbert. Then comes a string of other more-orless recognizable celebrities. All are female. All in skirts. Then, we stop seeing them from the neck up. We’re still in the land of the talk show, but our focus is on the women’s bare legs now. On their hands, as they tug at their skirt hems. On their body language, as they shift awkwardly in their chairs. It’s as if, under the pressure of the camera, they are struggling to protect themselves – which of course, they are.

By the time the sequence ends a minute and a half later, where you perhaps thought it might (Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct), you’ve had ample opportunity to consider the toxic intersection of media and gender. There’s nothing new here if you’ve read Judith Butler, or even tracked the public discourse around the #MeToo movement. Most of us have, if only belatedly, become well-versed in idea that gender is a performative function, which cannot exist outside of power dynamics and their attendant oppressions. To have that message framed so cogently and concisely, however, is a bracing experience.

And that’s just Jensen’s website. Her furniture conveys the same ideas with even greater force, putting its user quite literally in the position to respond. This feminist intervention into design began in 2018, while she was still a student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, with her series of Lady chairs. Pink, bulbous, and gynomorphic, each invites (or challenges) a sitter to adopt a stance with legs wide apart. Not just any sitter, though. Jensen asks that only those who identify as female use the chairs, directly contradicting the idea that this “man-spreading” posture is “unladylike.” Some women have said to her that the last time they had their legs that open was when giving birth.

Given how much we carry gender politics around with us, in our bodies, some women may well find it uncomfortable to use the Lady chairs, especially if others are near, looking on. It’s this very dynamic that most interests Jensen. That, and the way that this revealing moment may carry over to other experiences – other acts of living.

“This project is a gift and a curse,” she says. “I see it everywhere. How loud do we speak, how do we stand?

Women are taught to be small and silent.” Jensen’s designs completely subvert that expectation, and not only when in use. Since developing the Lady chairs, she has also created further designs that incarnate the principles that interest her: that women can and should take up public space; that femininity, properly construed, can itself be a form of empowerment; and that design has a critical potential that is only beginning to be realized. “When we fuck with everyday objects is when people get annoyed,” Jensen says. “And this annoyance helps.”

ANNA AAGAARD JENSEN Danish, b. 1990

Anna Aagaard Jensen [Danish, b. 1990] Nicola, 2022 Polyurethane foam, styrofoam, triaxial fiber, acrylic resin, A1, MAC blush 78.75 x 55.25 x 39.5 inches 200 x 140 x 100 cm

Anna Aagaard Jensen [Danish, b. 1990] The Grand Lady, 2018 Polyurethane foam, styrofoam, triaxial fiber, acrylic resin, MAC blush 46.5 x 36.75 x 50.5 inches 118 x 93 x 128 cm

Saelia Aparicio says that her furniture “happened almost by accident.” It was 2017, just a couple years after she graduated from the Royal College of Art in London. The work she was making was diverse, ranging from spiky, neo-Surrealist drawings to absurdist assemblages of mostly-found objects (including a stack of jars holding pickled, still-inflated balloons). If there was a common thread to her early output, it was a razor-sharp wit, combined with a curiosity about the many facets of the human condition.

Then came an opportunity to show at the Tetley in Leeds, in interesting circumstances: Aparicio’s works would be paired with those of six so-called “outsider artists,” all of them women. The exhibition was called Your Consequences Have Actions – an oddly inverted title that posited a back-to-front, Möbius strip causality. This involution was echoed in Aparicio’s first series of seating sculptures, made for the show in collaboration with her older sister, the designer Attua Aparicio. Wanting to create a situation in which viewers would have to explicitly consider the position of others, she hit upon the simple idea of inviting them to sit on people. The result, collectively titled be humble, was a series of blocky stools. Each depicts a naked woman, hunched over, hugging her knees with the head in between. It’s an extreme posture which conjures multiple contrasting scenarios: a game of hide-and-seek; a yoga session; sobbing in a corner; an imminent airplane crash. The fundamental idea, she says, “was to make interactive art,” she says, “in an experience that will stimulate other senses on top of the visual sense. When did interactive art become a synonym of digital?”

Compositionally, the seats present an interesting condition in that the figure is viewed flat-on, four times from the sides and once from above. Each aspect is rendered in Aparicio’s characteristic wiry draftsmanship. Though we are given few clues about identity – the odd tattoo, painted toenails – it’s clear that this is a diverse group, perhaps even a collective portrait of womanhood. (In fact each stool is based on, and named for, specific people in her circle of acquaintance.) Despite the hunched-over stance, they read as images of resilience, building blocks of society. Aparicio had in mind Kendrick Lamar’s video for HUMBLE (also 2017), a satirical call for introspection in the Black male community. The works also have a strong precedent in the rectilinear sculptures of the American artist Marisol, who so powerfully depicted the dialectic of strength and constraint, as well as works by Nicola L, the Peruvian artist Teresa Burga, and Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, all of which, according to Aparicio, “made me think about how making functional sculpture sits in feminist art practices.”

Since her strong start, Aparicio has continued to explore figurative furniture, including cabinet-like forms that seem to depict an upright body. Tall Girl (2021) is lushly illustrated in ink. Hands reach through a dense fall of hair, and plants are scattered here and there – Aparicio thinks of them as invasive species, propagating in the feral undergrowth. Miss James Riley (2021) has something of a 1980s Italian vibe, with cutout forms delineating the figure and glass objects making up a face. There’s something provisional in this last object, as if its figural guise is something assumed only for the moment, just as her earlier seating sculptures could be imagined uncoiling, standing up to look at us. Right in the eyes.

SAELIA APARICIO Spanish, b. 1982

Saelia Aparicio [Spanish, b. 1982] Alina, 2020 CNC Birch Plywood, Stain Dye, Chinese Ink 16.75 x 10.25 x 12 inches 42 x 26 x 30 cm

Saelia Aparicio [Spanish, b. 1982] Julia, 2020 CNC Birch Plywood, Stain Dye, Chinese Ink 18.25 x 16.75 x 15 inches 46 x 42 x 38 cm

Saelia Aparicio [Spanish, b. 1982] Lizzo, 2020 CNC Birch Plywood, Stain Dye, Chinese Ink 18.25 x 16.75 x 15 inches 46 x 42 x 38 cm

If figurative design is inherently narrative, then Carmen D’Apollonio is a master of the short story. Her works, through subtle indications, convey a very specific state of mind, very efficiently. They are more mood than metaphor. Both formally and psychologically, she employs concision, “putting a lot into a small space,” as she puts it, to invite imaginative response.

D’Apollonio primarily designs lamps, and primarily in clay, which she treats with a remarkable freshness. Even though her larger-scale works take a long time to make – the drying process alone can take months – her works invariably have the intuitive and gesture qualities of a sculptural idea still taking shape. It’s as if a brief observed moment had been fixed permanently for the purposes of contemplation.

The forms themselves tend to be disjunctive, piled-up, definitely depicting a human figure, but one seen through the eyes of a Cubist painter. The association to that particular moment in modernist history, a time in which perception was first being opened up as a field of limitless operation, is underlined by her Proustian titles, which evoke the atmosphere of a time half-remembered. Her works also call to mind the bathers that so many modernist artists treated as compositional experiments. In D’Apollonio’s hands, the subjectivity of the female figure – “gendered without being politicized,” she notes – is reclaimed.

All this makes D’Apollonio’s work sound rather serious, and it can be, even melancholy. But as with most of the other artists included in The New Figuration, there is also a rich vein of comedy flowing through her work. Her lamps, with their odd-sized and unexpectedly positioned shades, have an offbeat rhythm to them, as if they were just playing at being functional.

D’Apollonio often has the experience of watching her creations take on a life of their own. Where they begin is not where they end up. This is partly a technical matter – she builds mainly by coiling, a process that allows for gradual discovery, so that the form can find itself. But it’s also a feature of D’Apollonio’s own personality, which is clearly expressed in each of her works: so many different characters, born of the same deep well of humanity; so many shapes and sizes, united by a single purpose to illuminate.

CARMEN D’APOLLONIO Swiss, b. 1973

Carmen D’Apollonio [Swiss, b. 1973] Lady bird, 2021 Ceramic, linen shade 33.75 x 13.5 x 21 inches 85.7 x 34.3 x 53.3 cm

Carmen D’Apollonio [Swiss, b. 1973] Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone, 2021 Ceramic, linen shade 39.5 x 14.5 x 23.5 inches 100 x 37 x 60 cm

At 46 years of age, Chris Schanck is the elder statesman of The New Figuration. He’s been established in Detroit since 2011, when he graduated from Cranbrook. He manages a large and ultra-collaborative team, compounded of the diverse cultural resources of his immediate locality. He currently has a retrospective exhibition, Off World, at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). Schanck is also represented widely in museum collections, perhaps most strikingly at the Dallas Art Museum, where he recently created a spectacular response to a Gorham dressing table in the collection, a masterwork in its own right, crafted from silver in the Art Nouveau manner.

Schanck’s version, entitled Curbed Vanity, is a veritable thicket, both formally and thematically – a dense assemblage of trash, elevated to improbable glory with nothing more than aluminum foil and resin.

This magical object has a certain pride of place at MAD, appropriate to its glamour. And yet, for all that Schanck has achieved in his career so far, all the aesthetic ravishments he has wrought, in some ways he’s just getting going. It is only recently that he has begun to explore his full creative range. The most recent works in his retrospective are drawn (figuratively and literally – he sketches constantly) from an imaginative wellspring which has, until now, lay hidden beneath the gleaming surfaces of his work.

Figuration is the telltale sign of this narrative turn. Schanck’s new work is densely populated with allegorical beings. These uncanny presences do sometimes carry specific references – a lamp based on a Goya print, a large wall mirror inspired by a Sylvia Plath poem, a table alluding to the legend of Narcissus. But even in these cases of direct borrowing, there are very personal reasons for Schanck’s iconographical choices. His family history figures importantly into these decisions. So do his private fears and desires, which still remain largely undisclosed.

Schanck’s figurative works can best be understood as “primal scenes.” Freud, typically, placed a sexual construction on this phrase. But it can be applied more generally to experiences – whether had as a child, or later in life – that require a long working-through, and are never fully absorbed into rationality, or even a coherent self-image. This is what Schanck wants from figurative design. It is a means for him to externalize deeply held feelings, half-thoughts, memories. For all the extraordinary physicality of the resulting works – with their vivid color and characterization, their jewel-like perfection – they also seem like things witnessed only in dreams, their meanings knotted within, resistant to the tugs of the wakeful mind. He puts it like this: “Art makes the world make sense to me. And I want to make more sense to myself.”

CHRIS SCHANCK American, b. 1975

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] Narcissus, 2020 Wood, steel, polystyrene, paint, resin 45 x 46 x 32 inches 114 x 117 x 81 cm

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] The Universe is Left-handed, 2022 Steel, polystyrene, aluminum foil, resin, glass 82.5 x 22 x 22 inches 210 x 56 x 56 cm

Peter Paul Rubens’ Fall of the Rebel Angels, in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, is a veritable orgy of figuration. It shows the damned, in all their legions, being hurled from heaven to the inferno below. They tumble down in an avalanche of flesh. Their bodies and limbs are contorted, intertwined, agonized. It’s like something from a nightmare.

Or from the studio of Toomas Toomepuu. In a field that’s generally leaning toward the intuitive and the experimental, this Detroit-based designer (he works in the Hamtramck neighborhood, a short drive from Chris Schanck) nonetheless stands alone for the sheer profusion of his work. This is partly a matter of materials and techniques. Call of the Void, the cabinet Toomepuu has made for The New Figuration, for example, includes carved wood and polycarbonate, cast aluminum and bronze, blown and cut glass, epoxy clay, acrylic paints, steel, even salvaged copper from a solar panel. You would not be surprised to find an actual kitchen sink hiding in there. It sounds like it’d be a hot mess, but somehow Toomepuu puts it all together convincingly. He deals with complexity like a graffiti artist attacking a wall, something he in fact used to do: “I definitely learned a lot about resourcefulness.”

Figuration is a new and potent addition to Toomepuu’s methodological madness. It’s come into the work because of the anguish he’s seen on all sides, and felt himself, over the past two years. Abstraction just didn’t seem an adequate response. The figures he’s introduced, while somewhat cartoonish, are clearly undergoing torment, perhaps even their own sort of damnation. It’s the imagery of apocalypse. And worst of all, you get the strong feeling that, like Rubens’ rebel angels, they’re brought it all upon themselves.

Yet there’s also a place to hide. Toomepuu thinks of the aforementioned copper element in Call of the Void as a kind of shield, protecting the enclosed shelving area from the turbulence all around. In his own maximalist way, he’s actually applying a principle of good design, balancing more active and quieter compositional passages.

Like with everything, he turns that dynamic that up to eleven. The effect he’s after, he says, is like a band in performance “playing at fever pitch, until it seems like it can only fall apart.” When it somehow doesn’t, even the darkest, angriest music can arrive at pure bliss. It’s in this sense that Toomepuu’s figurative furniture, dystopian though it may be, offers the possibility of salvation. When reality seems like a bad dream, you might just want to wake up – even if that takes a good, hard slap in the face.

TOOMAS TOOMEPUU American, b. 1995

Toomas Toomepuu [American, b. 1995] Call of the Void, 2022 Aluminum, bronze, various hardwoods, glass, polycarbonate, epoxy, steel, hardware, stainless steel chain, casters, copper 82 x 62 x 40 inches 208 x 157 x 102 cm

Toomas Toomepuu [American, b. 1995] Managed Retreat, 2022 Cast aluminum, mirror 60 x 40 x 5 inches 152 x 102 x 13 cm

Figuration is not what it used to be. How could it be, when the body itself has become such a malleable thing? In contemporary visual culture, the human clay is manipulated with ease, morphed and filtered, seamlessly perfected and rendered monstrous, seemingly at will. Mass media serves as an all-purpose delivery system. Biology is no longer destiny, it’s often said; these days, it feels like it’s not even reality.

Shanghai-based, digital artist FEI Yining is entirely at home in this funhouse world. From the vantage point of traditional figuration, her objects are improbable to say the least. A totemic creature, lumpen and purple with batwing ears, buries its face poignantly in its pincer-like hands; illuminated lobes run down its midsection. A hybrid being called The Duke of Apple in the Ville Oubliette (i.e., the city of forgetting), seated in a chair that seems to be a part of him, legs outspread and claw-like hands held aloft, all the better for us to appreciate their embellishments of fake fur and fake jewelry.

The sheer level of elaboration, here, may make you suspect – correctly – that FEI’s figures are visitors from a whole other made-up world. In fact, she originally began making pieces of furniture simply to scan them for animation (a medium she’s continued to work in). “Sculpture turned out to be faster,” she says, and so she began developing techniques for realizing her characters, out here with the rest of us. These days she typically creates them on-screen using a modeling program called Blender, then renders them IRL in molded fiberglass, resin or papier-mâché – materials, you’ll notice, without any inherent structure, the better to translate from frictionless space.

Despite the alien physiognomies, there is something quite familiar about FEI’s inventions. We’ve seen them before, or maybe their cousins, in films and TV shows and video games. She willingly entertains this lineage, drawing analogies to a Disney film of her childhood, Beauty and the Beast (1991), which broke ground in the use of computer-generated imagery. “That is an important reference for me,” she says, “the psychic landscape of objects, standing in for the absent owner.”

Recently, FEI has returned to this allusion and considered its new relevance for a time of pandemic – when many people are kept company, day after day, only by the inanimate objects in their life. Making figural furniture in this situation, she comments, literalizes the sensation you might have had anyway. “It gives you a feeling of being fixed. You will not move. Look into the medusa’s eyes and you are petrified.” It’s a haunting image: as technology becomes more and more fluid, we, its users, are becoming gradually inert in comparison. And yet that dystopian prospect is to some extent complicated, perhaps even disproved, by what Fei herself is making. Creativity remains a peculiarly human trait; no Artificial Intelligence has come up with anything so wondrous strange as this.

FEI YINING

Chinese, b. 1990

FEI Yining [Chinese, b. 1990] Duke of Apple in the Vile Oubliette, 2020 Paper mache, foam, stainless steel pipe, watercolor, pearls, acrylic beads and wool 53.25 x 37.5 x 27.75 inches 135 x 95 x 70 cm

FEI Yining [Chinese, b. 1990] The Unnamed Invasion, 2021 3d printed resin, paper mache, aluminum, light fixture 32.25 x 13 x 12 inches 81.8 x 32.8 x 30.1 cm Edition of 3

What if furniture could use itself? Communicate its own purpose, as if it spoke sign language? Maybe even draw its own self-portrait? Such questions, occasioned by the work of Barbora Žilinskaitė, are not ones she’s interested in answering concretely. They hang in the room nonetheless, generating an air of possibility.

More than any other artist in The New Figuration, Žilinskaitė is interested in the way that imbuing design with a human shape also lends it apparent agency. So much is clear from her breakthrough body of work, Roommates.

Its genesis lay in a critique of industrially-produced objects. With its lack of human affect, she feels, mass-production contributes to our disregard for our own surroundings – including our casually exploitative relationship to the environment as a whole. It occurred to her that “perhaps figurative expression could help. You feel it as a person next to you, something that is alive. You feel the object not as an object. You appreciate what you have.”

It may seem fanciful to think that a seat shaped like a folded-over foot, or a magazine rack in the form of an outstretched hand, could be a serious remedy for modern alienation, much less climate change. Turn the question around, though. What would the objects in our lives be like, if we did truly care about them? Seen in this light, Žilinskaitė’s work begins to look like common sense. Even her favored material, reclaimed sawdust (which she mixes with pigment and a binder, making a solid medium to sculpt), is eminently rational, making use of what would otherwise be waste. “The story of the trees was lost when they were pulverized into dust,” she says, “and now spirit has returned to the form, completing a long cycle.” It’s a logic of her own, to be sure, and has led her to a way of working that edges into the domain of sculpture. But for all Žilinskaitė’s expressive individualism, her designs also have the rightness of a theorem solved.

Her most recent works continue this circuitous line of thinking to further, equally convincing conclusions. Her Storyteller cabinet (2021) folds its fingers in front of what one wants to call its belly, giving itself a hug. (Or perhaps, she muses, it is guarding the books held within, and the knowledge they contain.) Open the doors wide, conversely, and it seems to issue of gesture of welcome and embrace. Similarly, her two-tone Rock n Roll Quotidien prompts the lovely thought that a chair could rock itself to sleep. Animism of this sort runs through all of Žilinskaitė’s work. She helps us notice something about figurative design which we might otherwise miss: it sits somewhere between people and things, building a bridge between them. Walk out on to that span, and enjoy the view.

BARBORA ŽILINSKAITĖ Lithuanian, b. 1996

Barbora Žilinskaitė [Lithuanian, b. 1996] Collective Gymnastics, 2021 Wood dust, ply, pigment, varnish, glue 83 x 45 x 15.5 inches 211 x 114 x 39.5 cm Edition of 8

Barbora Žilinskaitė [Lithuanian, b. 1996] Rock ‘n Roll Quotidian, 2021 Wood dust, ply, pigment, varnish, glue 33.75 x 23.5 x 43.5 inches 85.5 x 59.5 x 110 cm Edition of 8

Barbora Žilinskaitė [Lithuanian, b. 1996] Roommates Stool [Turquoise], 2020 Wood dust, ply, pigment, varnish, glue 17.25 x 17.25 x 13.75 inches 44 x 44 x 35 cm Edition of 10

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] Narcissus (detail), 2020

The New Figuration C u r a te d by Gl en n A damson

Published by Friedman Benda 515 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel. + 1 212 239 8700 www.friedmanbenda.com Special thanks to Glenn Adamson.

Photography by Daniel Kukla and Clare Gatto.

All content copyright of Friedman Benda.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition The New Figuration, March 28 - April 19, 2022.