Pilar Corrias' artists propose a radical new reading of art history

On the rise of figurative female painters – and the gallerist championing them

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Around the time that critic Walter Robinson penned his now-famous essay on ‘zombie formalism’ in 2014, lamenting the tired tropes of abstraction, another genre rose from the undead: figurative painting. After years lying dormant, suddenly, unabashed depictions of bodies were everywhere in contemporary art. In the 2020s, the supply and demand for figurative painting is alive and well.For artists often sidelined in the art-historical canon as the subjects, rather than the authors, of painting&nbsp;–&nbsp;women, non-binary, and non-male creators&nbsp;– the genre&nbsp;has proved a fruitful creative ground. Yet their practices cannot be united under a monolithic aesthetic or approach. Rising stars like Amy Sherald and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/29310/Jordan-Casteel">Jordan Casteel</a> have reignited portraiture with a political approach to racial representation, while painters like Sarah Slappey and Emily Mae Smith fuse Surrealism with Pop art. Other artists, such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20954/Gina-Beavers">Gina Beavers</a>, take a visceral approach to rendering the female body.

This version of figuration, however, differs from the dramatically expressive canvases that heated up the art market in the early 1980s. Representatives of that&nbsp;male-dominated&nbsp;movement&nbsp;–&nbsp;variously dubbed Neo-Expressionism (in the U.S.), Transavanguardia (in Italy),&nbsp;and Neue Wilde (in Germany)&nbsp;–&nbsp;include&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6899/Francesco-Clemente">Francesco Clemente</a>, Sandro Chia, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11311/Julian-Schnabel">Julian Schnabel</a>. They&nbsp;reacted to 1970s-era Conceptualism by delving into often mythic subject matter. Looking back on her time as an art student, London gallerist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1424/Pilar-Corrias">Pilar Corrias</a> recalls being left cold by it. ‘They were looking at Classicism, and I just felt absolutely no connection to it,’ she remembers. While studying art history at Columbia and interning at Artforum, Corrias encountered works of postmodern feminist artists such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6942/Jenny-Holzer">Jenny Holzer</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8291/Cindy-Sherman">Cindy Sherman</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8010/Kiki-Smith">Kiki Smith</a>. ‘They were some of the first artists that spoke to me,’ she adds.


	Corrias’s feminist politics translated subconsciously to her namesake gallery, which she opened in 2008. ‘I’m aware that I show a lot of women artists, but it’s not necessarily something I set out to do as a project when I opened the gallery,’ she says. Today, 20 out of the 30 artists Corrias represents are women; 10 of those artists happen to make figurative painting.

Rather than a shared technique, Corrias sees a common thread among these artists to revise narratives of art history, from a female perspective. This politicized outlook is central to the gallery’s DNA. In 2007, before Corrias opened her gallery, she scouted painter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9635/Tala-Madani">Tala Madani</a> as a student at the Netherland’s Rikjsakademie. Madani, a native of Tehran now based in Los Angeles, was exclusively painting male nudes at the time. ‘Men have been painting women for hundreds of years, but here was a woman who was only painting men,’ Corrias remembers. She was immediately impressed by Madani’s renderings of ‘somewhat clumsy or funny or regressive’ figures from her imagination. ‘She was making you question these stereotypes of masculinity.’

If Madani’s early paintings of men critically deployed humor, several other artists in Corrias’s stable challenge the representation of women’s sexuality. The Greek-born artist Sofia Mitsola, who Corrias showed at Art Basel Hong Kong this month, looks to Greek mythology and Egyptian sculpture in her paintings. Corrias describes Mitsola’s goddesses and mythical creatures as confrontational, not passive: ‘They’re not there to be consumed; rather, they are consuming.’ Since the gallerist first discovered Mitsola’s practice at London’s Jerwood Space in 2019, ‘the work has become increasingly more sexual, but it’s also sexually ambiguous.’ The African American artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20763/Tschabalala-Self">Tschabalala Self</a>, whose work combines painting with fabric collage, ‘celebrates’ and ‘vindicates’ charged stereotypes. Similarly to Mitsola, Self ‘accentuates parts of the female body and throws them back at the viewer,’ Corrias adds. Her works depict exaggerated, voluptuous bodies, forcing viewers to examine their own prejudices and desires surrounding race, gender, and body type.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8630/Hayv-Kahraman">Hayv Kahraman</a>, the Iraqi-born, New York-based artist whose style borrows from traditions of Japanese and Persian miniature paintings, has recently turned to painting female contortionists. Her canvases also provoke an ambiguous response to sexualized representation. ‘You’re attracted, looking at something that’s so extraordinary but kind of freaky,’ Corrias explains. Kahraman’s work addresses the eroticized, exoticized perception of non-Western women: ‘She’s really expanding this idea of otherness.’

For some artists at Corrias’s gallery, fluidity becomes a political stance. ‘The work is often perceived as being about sex,’ Corrias says of the Los Angeles­–based painter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/22486/Christina-Quarles">Christina Quarles</a>. ‘For her, it’s about the non-fixedness of sexual identity.’&nbsp;In Quarles’s compositions, many elements remain open to interpretation&nbsp;–&nbsp;from the number of figures in the paintings to their relationship to one another. ‘Are they male? Are they female?&nbsp;We don't know their racial background. You don’t know if they are in a loving situation or violent,’ Corrias explains. Likewise, it is unclear whether Quarles sources her raindrops, trees, and flowers from natural or digital sources. ‘This vagueness, the fact that you're not sure if it's coming from reality or a computer, is very important,’ Corrias adds.

Still other figurative artists embrace an activist posture. Gisela McDaniel, a Detroit-based artist who will have her second solo show with Corrias in 2022, creates portraits of womxn and non-binary individuals who have experienced sexual violence. McDaniel embeds objects that are significant to her sitters on the surface of the paintings. Corrias explains that McDaniel used to paint her subjects with masks, to protect their identities. ‘You have the remnants on the faces,’ she explains of the objects. ‘It’s like scarring, or the idea of the mask coming away.’ Alongside the canvases, she includes audio recordings of her interviews with the subjects discussing their healing process. ‘You see historical paintings about war and violence,’ Corrias says. Yet the international epidemic of sexual violence, Corrias says, is rarely depicted from a survivor’s perspective.&nbsp;

These women artists approach the patriarchal history of figurative painting not as a limitation, but as a field of untapped possibility. In challenging that history, their works reach depths of ambiguity, humor, and fearless self-reflection.Wendy Vogel is an author based in New York City.Top image:&nbsp;Gisela McDaniel, Look back/Look forward (detail), 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.

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<div>‘We really look after each other,’ says the artist</div>

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On the rise of figurative female painters – and the gallerist championing them

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