cover image Picturing People: The New State of the Art

Picturing People: The New State of the Art

Charlotte Mullins. Thames & Hudson, $40 (192p) ISBN 978-0-500-23938-4

In this companion to 2006’s Painting People, art critic Mullins explores the latest wave of figurative art in the contemporary marketplace, both celebrating individual artists and contemplating why figuration has become popular yet again. Focusing primarily on painting (with photography and digital work occasionally included), Mullins presents artists of various nationalities, aesthetics, and levels of notoriety, resulting in a robust yet focused gloss on what figuration might be. Artists are organized into five thematic sections. “Image Hunters,” for instance, collects artists who engage with photography, most often as source material; Li Songsong’s Cubist-reminiscent oil paintings based on photographs find a place here, as do John Stezaker’s “Marriage” collages, in which photographs of two actors are manually spliced into one image. In “Observer/Observed,” figuration is contemplated as a tool for social and political engagement, as in Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits in costumed personas and Liu Xiaodong’s massive oil paintings of human subjects occupying landscapes such as a town destroyed by the 2010 Sichuan earthquake. Figurative art is a broad subject, but Mullins’s astute overview pairs powerfully with the selected images, offering a perceptive argument for the enduring range and power of figuration into the 21st century. [em](Oct.) [/em]