NEW YORK.- Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to announce Figures in Dialogue: Marisol, Alex Katz, Julian Opie, three masters of figuration whose works explore in different ways the territory between naturalism and artifice.

The exhibition contains sculpture, paintings, prints, and multiples which demonstrate the artists’ ease in working in both two and three dimensions. Despite their different use of materials and abstract syntax, Marisol, Katz, and Opie share a reverence for the complex relationships that develop between the natural and the artificial, the impersonal and the human, the particular and the global.

Since the 1960s, Marisol’s (born Marisol Escobar in 1930) sculpture has consisted of assemblages of found objects and angular blocks of wood carved and painted by the artist. The features of her individuals are painted on, carved, or cast in plaster and affixed to chunky blocks of wood along with identifying props, such as metal handlebars, an old shoe, or in the case of Portrait of Magritte, whom she greatly admires, the artist’s trademark bowler hat and umbrella . Satire, humor, and fantasy are no strangers to Marisol’s work, connecting her to Dada as well as the Pop movement with which she is most often associated.

Alex Katz, who exhibited with Marisol at Tanager Gallery in New York in the 1960s, is best known for painted portraits of family and friends in which color field abstraction collides with realism. His streamlined yet nuanced approach extends from painting to graphic work to Katz’s unique innovation—the aluminum cutouts—which are as economical as Marisol’s sculptures are earthy. The exhibition contains Katz’s well-known cutout, Standing Ada from 1987, as well as his most recent: the life-size, recumbent Cow.

Julian Opie carries the mantle of figuration into the 21st century by using technology—digital photography, LED, and animation – to create simplified and iconic versions of the contemporary environment. As with Katz, human scale is central to Opie’s figures, as is the flattening of volumes in space, and the use of color backgrounds against which stylized figures are seen. Despite their generic schema, Opie’s portraits are uncannily expressive, as is seen in Ruth Smoking, a series of five different lambda prints in which casual gestures- a folded arm or tilt of a wrist – humanize a faceless model.