PRESS RELEASE

January 14, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Sandra Q. Firmin
Curator, UB Art Gallery
716.645.0570
sfirmin@buffalo.edu

UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts (north campus) presents an 
exhibition of contemporary still life and figuration

February 17–May 14, 2011

Buffalo, NY – 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, February 
17 from 5 to 7 p.m. 	
	Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.- 5 p.m. For information, 
please call 716-645-6913.
	The twentieth 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 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, 
Richard Huntington, John 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.

The UB Art Gallery is located in the Center for the Arts on the North 
Campus just north of the I-290 on Millersport Highway. Traveling east or 
west on the I-290 take exit 5B to Millersport Highway North. Turn onto 
the campus at the Coventry entrance. As you enter the campus, the Center 
for the Arts is a high gabled white building directly ahead of you.

After 3 PM and on weekends, parking is free and a permit is not 
required. During all other times, guests must park in metered spaces, 
visitor parking lots, or obtain a parking permit from UB Art Gallery 
staff. In order to obtain a parking permit, temporarily park in the 
circle in front of the Center for the Arts and see a gallery attendant 
inside.

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High resolution images available on request