Friday, February 4, 2011

Figuration and its Disconnects


room with a view 2009

UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts presents an exhibition of

contemporary still life and figuration February 17–May 14, 2011

Buffalo, NY –

The exhibition title “Figuration and its Disconnects” is a play on Sigmund

Freud’s canonical book Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), which examines the interplay between society and the individual, whose instinctual desires for aggression and sex threaten to destabilize societal relations.

The twentieth century bore witness to the upheavals of continuous war, the Space Age, the Civil Rights’ and Women’s movements, decolonization, ecological devastation, and the rise of mass media. “Figuration and its Disconnects” explores how we relate to each other, and even inanimate objects, in such a world. The exhibition pairs work from the university’s permanent collection with work by Western New York-based artists work includes drawings,

paintings, and an immersive installation. These artists’ representations of people and things comment on the authority, seduction, miscommunication, powerlessness, happiness, whimsy, and alienation that arguably define our communal existence.