Figurative art has been hot for quite a few years now, but it’s always been widely popular. That’s partly because, for most people, art acts as a mirror in which they expect to see themselves and their world reflected back at them. Even when it represents unfamiliar subjects or experiences, figurative art facilitates this process of self-affirmation. It’s by differentiation that we come to know ourselves.
This strangeness, or refusal to conform to convention, is more difficult to detect in abstract, static works designed to hang on a wall. Even so, we might associate it with the heavily layered paintings of Carrie Moyer, and their textured passages that threaten to spill over or consume carefully stenciled forms. Or the canvases of Amy Sillman, whose gestural yet methodical compositions subvert the expectation that they depict a human figure at nearly every turn. “Capacity and openness are not the same as ambiguity,” noted art historian David Getsy in his “Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction” (2019). Paradoxically, the challenge of identifying such work as queer is the very thing that makes the term fit.
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