Neo-figurative

also: Nueva Figuración · New Figuration · Neofiguration

movement 1960s Argentina Mexico

Neo-figurative art - Nueva Figuración - emerged around 1960 across Spain and Latin America as painters pushed back against the dominance of abstraction without retreating to academic realism. Its heart was Argentina, where the Otra Figuración group (Luis Felipe Noé, Jorge de la Vega, Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció) staged its defining Buenos Aires exhibition in 1961, and Mexico, where José Luis Cuevas and the Nueva Presencia group attacked the nationalist mural tradition. The figure returns in these works, but distorted, fragmented, and entangled in agitated paint - a body made to carry the political turmoil of the 1960s rather than to pose. Working with collage, splattered and scraped pigment, and bright clashing color, these artists made subjectivity and social crisis the twin poles of a new figuration.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • The human figure returns - distorted, fragmented, or surfacing from abstract tangles of paint
  • Bright, clashing color with free, expressionistic brushwork
  • Raw, informal surfaces: scraped, splattered, and collaged material left visibly worked
  • Dark, Goya-like imagery of power, violence, and alienation in contorted bodies
  • Everyday and marginalized subjects - performers, the dispossessed - instead of heroes or myths
  • Dense, agitated grounds in which figure and abstraction remain visibly in tension

Key figures

  • Luis Felipe Noé (1933-2025) — Intellectual leader of Argentina's Otra Figuración and author of its theory, Antiestética (1965)
  • Jorge de la Vega (1930-1971) — Otra Figuración member whose rag collages and textured figures set the group's rawest note
  • Ernesto Deira (1928-1986) — Otra Figuración painter of grotesque, Goya-haunted figures with freer brushwork
  • Rómulo Macció (1931-2016) — Otra Figuración painter and former Phases member whose work centered on social themes
  • José Luis Cuevas (1934-2017) — Mexican painter-draftsman who attacked the muralist tradition in his 1956 'Cactus Curtain' manifesto

Example works

  • Theory and Practice of Power — Luis Felipe Noé (1961)
  • Los Náufragos — Jorge de la Vega (1959)
  • Danza de montaña — Jorge de la Vega (1963)

Sources

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