Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York
David Zwirner Gallery
537 West 20th Street, New York
May 7–July 17, 2022
In 1995, New York was a city on edge and on the rise. Giuliani was polishing his legacy, the art world was still reeling from the death of the East Village scene, and Chelsea was only just beginning to hum with the energy of artists and dealers ready to reinvent contemporary practice. Identity politics were seeping into every cultural surface; AIDS was still a collective trauma; and a new kind of figuration—personal, thorny, and emotionally keyed up—was pushing back against the arid conceptualism of the late 1980s. Painting, long declared dead, returned to center stage not with a bang but with an unsettling whisper, one delivered by artists who saw figuration not as retrograde but as radical.
David Zwirner’s Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York revisits this charged, transitional moment by assembling work from eight artists who defined a new visual language in the 1990s: John Currin, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, and Lisa Yuskavage. These painters, as the gallery notes, “redefined what painting could be” by grafting art historical tropes onto contemporary anxieties, resurrecting figuration with irreverence, ambiguity, and emotional bite.
Currin’s canvases—gleaming with misogynistic kitsch, Old Master flourishes, and moral confusion—remain polarizing, if magnetic. His 1997 works The Bra Shop and The Cripple, first seen at Andrea Rosen Gallery, are back with all their grotesque intimacy intact. They belong to a generation of paintings that Norman Bryson described as “swerving between attraction and repulsion,” a phrase that might also apply to Yuskavage’s Bad Babies series. These lush portraits of luminous, infantilized female figures teeter between saccharine beauty and psychological menace, balancing formal mastery with confrontational eroticism.
Equally attuned to disquiet, Marlene Dumas’s spectral The Conspiracy (1994)—shown at Jack Tilton Gallery—feels like a hallucinated interrogation scene from a collapsing archive. With brushstrokes that flicker between presence and erasure, her figures seem to breathe and vanish all at once. Dumas, like Luc Tuymans, reclaims ambiguity as a mode of resistance. Tuymans’s gauzy images of post-Oklahoma City anxiety, from his 1996 show The Heritage, are just as hushed and devastating as ever—paintings that speak of trauma without shouting, still deeply relevant in our own moment of cultural volatility.
Elsewhere, the exhibition pivots toward affect and fandom: Peyton’s portraits of Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher pulse with teenage intensity, painted with a devotional touch that elevated pop culture to near-hagiographic status. Laura Owens, whose layered compositions reanimate painting’s decorative roots with deadpan wit, reminds us—per Roberta Smith’s 1998 review—that “what is beautiful is also funny.” Her works, with their nods to folk art and comic books, expand painting’s narrative capacity by collapsing the hierarchies of high and low.
Finally, there is Chris Ofili’s Afrofuturist opulence: his Afrodizzia (1996), bejeweled with glitter and elephant dung, dazzles and confronts in equal measure. A standout from the now-infamous Sensation exhibition, it is both ecstatic and weighty, packed with references to Black culture and the sublime absurdity of myth-making. At a time when multiculturalism was still a contested terrain in the art world, Ofili offered a model for how pleasure, politics, and formal innovation could co-exist on the same dazzling surface.
Revisiting these works in 2025 feels less like a historical recap and more like a subtle indictment. What was once defiant figuration now reads as foundational. Circa 1995 reminds us that painting’s so-called death was always an illusion—and that its resurrection, when it came, was lush, weird, and unapologetically human.
