Salman Toor’s show in New York and Christina Quarles’s in Chicago reveal the enduring — but continually evolving — style of the centuries-old art form known as figuration.
This article is part of our latest special report on Museums, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.
Until fairly recently, the world of contemporary art went through a period of turning up its nose on figurative art — works that have a strong resemblance to the real world, especially the human figure.
But two new exhibits by two queer artists on opposite coasts help demonstrate how much that attitude has changed — and how much the change is fueled by fresh perspectives.
The exhibitions — “Salman Toor: How Will I Know” at the Whitney Museum of American Art and “Christina Quarles” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago — present two artists around the same age and at similar career stages with strikingly different styles of figuration.
But Mr. Toor, based in New York, and Ms. Quarles, who lives in Los Angeles, both use a brush to tell previously obscure stories, proving that traditional representational art has the durability to be constantly reinvented, played with and recharged.
“It’s an exciting moment,” said Christopher Y. Lew, the Whitney curator who organized Mr. Toor’s show with Ambika Trasi, a curatorial assistant. “Younger painters are reinvesting energy in figuration.”
Amongst the vast variety of genres available
within the discipline of literature, ‘children literature’ is a sincere promise
of complexity punctuated by signs and symbols. The folk-cum-fantasy tale of
the Little Red Riding Hood epitomises the same intricate
network of literary devices. Multimedia artist Shahzia Sikander, with her
visual language adds wings to Little Red Riding Hood,
metaphorically, that lets her fly to enjoy gymnastics in the red and white
striped suit or even carry a face of the woman from Indo-Persian miniature
painting. Many artists draw influence from mythology and other creative arts,
but a few of them truly blend the aesthetic of the two successfully with their
artistic oeuvre.
Red
Riding Hood, 1997Image Credit: Courtesy of Shahzia Sikander
Sikander has a vast variety of critically
engaging works that are rooted in her feminist and Muslim perspectives, never
far from her transnational Pakistani-American identity. Currently living and
working in New York, Sikander talks about her passion for literature in an
interview, “I see myself as a thinker. Literary histories, poetry, ghazal,
rap, fiction, opera are magical places of departures for me. Such an interface
with language has been hand in hand with my growth as a visual artist and an
individual interested in story-telling and collaborative works.”
Shahzia Sikander; Image Credit: Courtesy of Matthias_Ziegle
The accomplishment of the art forms does not limit its demands to admiration, but its sustenance is dependent on expanding its scope to let the artists experiment with its language. In a similar vein, given the finesse and intricate work of Indo-Persian miniature paintings, Sikander has persistently strived to re-examine its patronage, origin and ownership. The richness of the illuminated manuscripts and unarchived materials has been a repository of signs and symbols to add to her contemporary visual idiom. Interestingly, the wide usage of media and scales of her artworks – from murals, multichannel single-image video to permanent public-art, allow her to effectively translate these knowledge-systems to the artworks.
Gopi-Contagion, 2015. HD video animation on digital LED billboards Image Credit: Courtesy of Shahzia Sikande
Within the socio-cultural fabric of South Asia, the history of British imperialism creeps in to shape the politics of representations. History is not accepted as a clean slate but regularly negotiated and reconciled with to raise multiple realities. Sikander poses a pertinent question on the layers of history when she asks, “When one thinks in terms of narratives, and how history, including art history, is determined, how real is that account?” To counter the colonial amnesia, Sikander’s works challenge patriarchal and colonial narratives to give a voice to women who are relegated to the margins of the history. She adds, “It is inspiring to see how a young demographic of women is opening the political discourse towards a more participatory space for non-white people. In that spirit of empowerment, many young women are fighting for equal rights and representation and climate change.”
Parallax, 2013. Three-channel, single-image HD video animation; Image Credit: Courtesy of Shahzia Sikander
Her complex mosaic portrait Mary-Am at Midtown Houston celebrates the presence of the feminine force in nature, cultures and religions across the globe. If human life on the earth came from water, then the face of the woman with its painterly marks, as seen through the rushes of water, is looking at the open sky to symbolically lay bare the truth of abundance of life and harmony. Resonating with the contemporary times of shrinking cultures and shifting borders, Sikander’s artistic journey is a careful craft of experimentation with the technical and aesthetic aspect of the art to let the viewers partake the pleasure of criticality and sensitivity towards the surrounding.
Mary-Am, a permanent public art fountain; Image Credit: Courtesy of Shahzia Sikander
