CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/12/2015

Drawing People: The Human Figure in Contemporary Art

"There is only convention in the 'realistic' depiction of the body. The body depicted always tends towards exaggeration, either in the convention of the grotesque or the convention of the ideal. There are few images less interesting than an exact anatomical drawing of the human form.
This problem arises from the corresponding problem of the absence of stance. Grotesque realism is emblematic of the body’s knowledge of itself, a knowledge of pieces and parts, of disassociated limbs and an absent center. The realism of the ideal is emblematic of the body’s knowledge of the other, a knowledge of facades, of two dimensions. Only in the embrace is the other’s body known as one’s own, in parts. Perhaps this is why the grotesque has become the domain of lived sexuality, while the ideal has tended toward the domain of the voyeur and the pornographer." Excerpt from Susan Stewart's On Longing: Narratives in the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, and Louise Bourgeois' 2007 gouache, "The Feeding" (made when the artist was in her late nineties) are reproduced from D.A.P.'s indispensible new survey of contemporary figuration, Drawing People.