This online exhibition focuses on a group of artists whose expressive modes of figuration intimately capture the struggle of what it means to be human.  The artworks herein are visual testaments to their maker's existence; artists laid bare.

In Rainen Knecht’s paintings, the artist examines familial bonds and the existential fears of being both artist and mother, all told through a curious mix of fairy tales, humor and ferocity. One can see the ghosts of early expressionists, like Kirchner, haunting the artist's canvases with her aggressive but unapologetically beautiful brushwork and color. Humor and ferocity also characterize a selection of monoprints by Russian-born and New York-based artist Dasha Shishkin. Shishkin employs a twisted and amorphous draftsmanship to create loose narratives that  a glimpse into a strange reality filled with eroticism, fantasy and amusement.

The works of Marta Nadolle and Jennifer Sullivan seem to exist as a means of expressing the intimacy of the artists' everyday lives. Polish artist Marta Nadolle's intricate works depict the artist, herself, and the challenges of navigating day-to-day life as a young woman living in Warsaw. Delicate brushwork, surreal spaces, shifting scale and text are woven together to depict emerging relationships, events and memories, filled with pain and hope. Jennifer Sullivan's paintings are meditations on lived experience, as well, yet she merges her personal observations with contemporary cultural narratives — protagonists from film and music — using energetic brushwork and luminous color.

Canadian painter Delphine Hennelly's works often quote subjects of 18th century artists like Watteau and Fragonard. Beautifully composed with a blend of heavy impasto, pattern and a rainbow palette, Hennelly uses the archetypical to explore gender roles, creating stunning and wholly original works. San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist Liz Hernandez's use of the body explores the mysteries of identity and the self through a wide range of Mexican craft techniques and materials including painting, sculpture, embroidery, and for this exhibition, embossed tin and metal. Rooted in anthropology, syncretism, and cultural traditions, her work is at once deeply personal and universal, portraying internal conflicts unbound by time and place. 

In the works of Shai Yehezkelli (Israel) and Alexandra Duprez (France), the figure can feel like an incidental outgrowth of the physical act of painting, as limbs and human features appear and diverge. Yet deeply seeded in these works are each artist's intention to reach beyond process and derive meaning from these anonymous human forms. With abstraction and imagination at the forefront, no single work can be readily identified as ‘figurative’, but the paint that creates these abstracted bodily references is imbued with the sincerity of the human soul.

Undoubtedly, it's in all of these fearlessly personal, sincere and intimate works that we see the power of revealing oneself — manifesting the human soul through the human body — as a testament to the vitality of contemporary figurative art.