S-Curve

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce S-Curve, a group exhibition bringing together artworks from the 18th century to present day that reflect on the human body in an active state of repose. Encompassing an array of eras, media, and formal approaches, the exhibition illustrates the elasticity of an art historical trope and underscores the complexities and possibilities present in contemporary depictions of the body. While both academic and scientific representations of the human body privilege anatomical exactness—with strict attention paid to what can be codified and standardized—artists throughout history have just as often taken the body to be a gateway to so many fantastic and surreal forms. The artists in S-Curve interpret the figure at rest through its historically familiar expressions, such as the reclining nude, to more contemporary and challenging forms that see it as being between motion and stasis, between gender and subjectivity. Rather than situate the body as a form fixed and unchanged across time, the exhibition instead uses a wide historical lens to show how the human figure has, for centuries, been a constant source of surprise and invention.