NEW YORK, NY.- Human forms can be intensely intimate or broadly universal. Today’s best figurative artists use the human form as a tool to express varied content and contemporary topics involving race, gender, political and social issues. The paintings depict our feelings and sentiments, our sense of belonging to a larger community in the contemporary world, while capturing the impulses behind the range of figuration presented by today’s contemporary international artists.

Bodies of Work examines the continuing compulsion in fine art to render the human figure through a curated collection of the work of international artists. Portraitist Marlene Dumas, born in South Africa and a resident of Amsterdam, presents figures in a gritty, unsentimental manner, evoking the essence of the human condition, while American Kerry James Marshall paints the life of African Americans in the twentieth century, employing recent historical review to document the social challenges. British artist Jenny Saville paints the figure in massive scale, combined with an overt, never-ending interest in the pure rendering of human flesh. New York artist Hope Gangloff paints her figures as characters, intimate friends, and acquaintances, narrating a drama from their canvases.

This volume follows Ms. Della Monica’s 2013 book about contemporary American landscape painting, Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views (Schiffer Publishing.) The author is a New York-based art advisor who specializes in advising private collectors on acquisitions and sales of modern and contemporary fine art. For more information, see Ms. Della Monica’s website: www.lpdmfineart.com

Lauren Pheeney Della Monica, a New York-based art consultant, specializes in advising private clients on building collections of modern and contemporary fine art. After earning her Royal Society of Arts Diploma in Connoisseurship from Christie’s Education followed by her law degree, Lauren worked in an American paintings gallery, the Citibank Private Bank Art Advisory Service, the art law group of a prestigious Manhattan law firm, and MoMA’s Office of the General Counsel before founding her art advisory firm, LPDM Fine Art, in 2004. She is a member of the Association of Professional Art Advisors (APAA.)

Ms. Della Monica’s latest title, Bodies of Work, Contemporary Figurative Painting, will be published by Schiffer Publishing in December 2015. The author has written about contemporary art (Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views, Schiffer, 2013), nineteenth-century American marine painting, as well as numerous articles on art collecting.

Ms. Della Monica is presently curating various museum exhibitions about contemporary art, including Making Her Mark at The Mattatuck Museum in April 2016 and a traveling museum exhibition based on her book, Painted Landscapes, opening in 2017.