In This Moment Of Collective Anxiety, New Images of Man Ponders The Human Condition, And Further Disquiets The Sense

at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the expansive exhibition New Images of Man is a both a revisiting of and expansion on a 1959 exhibition of the same name at MoMA in New York City. A tribute and comment on the human condition, the original exhibition, curated by Peter Selz, focused on new figurative work following WWII. As such, it included a wide range of artists, from de Kooning to Giacometti, working in both sculptural forms and painted images. The Blum & Poe iteration offers its own view of figurative human depiction in a vast variety of genres, from pigment prints to acrylic and oil-on-canvas, fabric, paper-mache and other mixed media, as well as sculptural figures in bronze, plaster, and even created from a mixture of fabric and human hair.

The mediums exhibited are not the only example of diversity in that there are 43 global artists in the exhibition. They are based in the U.S., Western Europe, Egypt, Haiti, the Sudan and many other nations. Along with a far broader global reach, this exhibition, unlike the original, does not exclude female artists. Here, Gingeras creates a more inclusive and comprehensive interpretation of original curator’s intent to reveal era-specific “effigies of the disquiet man,” as exhibition notes described it.