Flatline Gallery Director Elizabeth Munzon thinks that figurative artwork gets a bad rap. After spending years in art school drawing still lifes and capturing the figures of nude figure models, she said the style becomes associated with academia and isn’t “taken as seriously as it should be.”
In 2018, she dedicated an entire show to the realistic art style, and this year the exhibit has returned for its third iteration in “In The Now Figurative.” This weekend is residents’ last chance to view the exhibit.
“After coming out of art school, at the time, I felt like the schools or professors were pushing students more towards abstraction or installation or sculptural work,” said Munzon, curator of the show and a figurative artist. “I just had a sense that the figure was more just a way to learn composition, shape and form rather than pushing it and continuing your subject matter within the figure.”
The exhibit features a wide range of pieces by artists at different stages in their careers, each of whom created figurative pieces in their medium of choice. For some, it’s their first time exhibiting works in years.
Artist Sergio Teran is one of those artists. He contributed two pieces to the exhibit.
One depicts young adults frozen in time, dancing next to a DJ stand. To the right, figures dressed in Klu Klux Klan regalia hold torches, making their way to the dance floor. A large glowing hand stops them from entering. The piece was painted during the two years that saw rising hate crimes and an uprising over racial inequality.
Teran was inspired by his experience as a parent, wanting to shield his son from the dangers that marginalized people experience in the United States. Protest images were used as references for the young adults on the dance floor, along with a picture of his son, who’s depicted swinging his arms to the beat of the music.
“If I had any advice for the younger generation, certainly for my son, is to not be intimidated by the fear of a tumultuous history of the place you’re in,” Teran said. “That’s where the painting was coming from, allowing them freedom, allowing them a bit of mischief and to be young people, and to stop the fear of hate that those uniforms represent.”
Artist Sarah Vonepp contributed a self-portrait titled “Modern Madonna,” a twist on the 13th-century religious painting “Madonna and the Child.” In the original painting, the Virgin Mary holds baby Jesus.
In Vonepp’s interpretation, a figure of herself holds a potted plant surrounded by orange and yellow clouds reminiscent of Western paintings. The piece is a reclamation of her choice to be childless, something she said, “a lot of people are condemned for, or not believed.”
The painting pokes fun at religious iconography and alludes to the modern idea of a “plant mom.”
“It’s a running joke that people make about millennials and Gen Z, that their pets are their children or their plants are their pets,” Vonepp said. “I was playing on that.”
These narrative pieces, and others, will be on display at Flatline Gallery, located at 6023 Atlantic Ave., on Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. until July 31. The gallery will hold a closing reception on Sunday, July 31 from 4 to 6 p.m.
“The fingerprint of making the piece and the breadth of making the piece exists physically in them,” Teran said. “I hope people can experience that in person as opposed to scrolling through something.”