Rita Ackermann
Paweł Althamer
Joan Brown
Derrick Alexis Coard
William N. Copley
Barkley L. Hendricks
Robert Hudson
Cheyenne Julien
Marie Laurencin
Irving Marcus
Barbara Nessim
Woody De Othello
Richard Prince
Joseph Raffael
Michael Williams

Karma is pleased to present Kinder Gentler Nation, in which five generations of artists use the figure as a point of departure and arrival. This is not an attempt to catalog ideas about figurative painting and sculpture, but rather a gathering of approaches by artists of parallel, intersecting, but frequently divergent histories and backgrounds, from Los Angeles to Warsaw, the beginnings of Cubism to scatological cartoon surrealism.

Here are dancers, skeletons, humanoids, caricatures, aliens, Afrogods, rubber-hose cartoons, dapper gents, melting limbs, wrestlers, fools, aristocrats. These figures are sites for narrative, abstraction, symbology, architectural deconstruction, portraiture, surrealism and a myriad of other strategies, drawn, scratched, painted, sculpted, and collaged. Together as a motley and intriguingly ill-fitting group, themes and conversations, not to mention multiple overlapping histories (Appropriation, Classicism, Funk, Outsider Art, Pop), emerge between the artists.

Thanks to: Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw; George Adams Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, New York; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Joan Brown Estate; Nahmad Contemporary, New York; Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; White Columns; William N. Copley Estate.

Image by Mathew Cerletty.