Redefining the Figure:
Selections from the Collection

Redefining the Figure: Selections from the Collection explores the many ways artists have depicted the human figure since the early twentieth century. Drawn from the Bechtler Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that range from recognizable representations of the body to radical experiments in abstraction. 

 

Organized around three interconnected themes, the exhibition considers the figure as a site of continual artistic reinvention. A section on portraits examines how artists engaged with identity and individual presence, while another focuses on gesture and movement. A third section traces the ways artists fragmented, simplified, and transformed the human form, at times pushing it to the threshold of recognition. 

 

Spanning over one hundred years of artmaking, Redefining the Figure features work by artists including Edgar Degas, Max Ernst, Sam Francis, Maud Gatewood, Le Corbusier, Juan Logan, Pablo Picasso, and Elizabeth Turk. Together, they reveal the enduring importance of the human figure as a subject through which modern and contemporary artists have developed new visual languages and approaches to representation.