Despite the increasing influence of European modernism in the twentieth century, with its emphasis on an ever-purer abstraction, many artists in the Americas and beyond have remained committed to the representation of the body. Their reasons are myriad, as the artists in The Body Imagined demonstrate. The human form has retained a potential to communicate in rich and innovative ways about art and the world around us.
The first section of the exhibition, Body Language, examines artists who turned to the representation of the body to make their art accessible to the largest-possible audiences, often with the goal of promoting social and political transformation. Whether in Mexico, the United States, the Caribbean or West Africa, and whether working with paint, printmaking, collage or photography, their work conveys new ways of imagining ourselves individually and collectively.
The artists in Changing Forms complicate the line between abstraction and figuration, in the process challenging the idea that our bodies are singular, coherent forms. By using techniques that fragment the human form, forceful brushstrokes that render it illegible or methods that obscure it entirely, they encourage us to consider what being in a body feels like, rather than merely looks like.
In Framing the Figure, artists explore how our ideas of the body—including notions of gender and race—are formed by mass media, consumer culture and other elements of our image-saturated environments.