UB Art Gallery Presents Exhibition of Contemporary Still Life and Figuration Feb. 17 to May 14

BUFFALO, N.Y. -– The exhibition title "Figuration and its Disconnects" is a play on Sigmund Freud's canonical book Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), which examines the interplay between society and the individual, whose instinctual desires for aggression and sex threaten to destabilize societal relations.

The exhibition will take place in the first floor gallery of the UB Art Gallery in the UB Center for the Arts, North Campus. It is free and open to the public. A public reception will be held Thursday, Feb. 17, from 5-7 p.m.

Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For information, call 716-645-6913.

The 20th century bore witness to the upheavals of continuous war, the Space Age, the Civil Rights and Women's movements, decolonization, ecological devastation and the rise of mass media. "Figuration and its Disconnects" explores how we relate to each other, and even inanimate objects, in such a world. The exhibition pairs work from the university's permanent collection by Bruce Adams, Leon Golub, Libby Hague, Lester Johnson and William Scott with work by Western New York-based artists James A. Allen, Roberley Bell, Amanda Besl, Jonathan Daly, Andrew Engl, Jackie Felix, Richard Huntington, Joan Linder, Nathan Naetzker, Kurt Von Voetsch and Adam Weekly that includes drawings, paintings and an immersive installation.

These artists' representations of people and things comment on the authority, seduction, miscommunication, powerlessness, happiness, whimsy and alienation that arguably define our communal existence. A man asleep next to a corded phone; expertly tied ropes suggesting the contours and weight of an absent body; sunlit young women on the cusp of adulthood; frieze-like giants dancing in city streets; and a dead starling set against a fuchsia background are just a few of the images, impregnated with the violence and pleasure of their lived realities, that viewers will encounter in this exhibition.

The UB Art Gallery is funded by the UB College of Arts Sciences, the Visual Arts Building Fund and the Seymour H. Knox Foundation Fine Arts Fund.