STORRS, CT.- The Contemporary Art Galleries will present Figuring The Landscape, September 11 - October 20, 2006. The exhibition will include artists Hernan Bas, Manfredi Beninati, Till Gerhard, Julie Heffernan, Loren Holland, Sven Kroner, Neo Rauch, Andrew Sendor, and Ena Swansea.

Figuring The Landscape brings to Connecticut some of today’s hot young figurative painters from Europe and North America. Their polished canvases present a range of fresh ways to interpret the traditional theme; the figure set within a landscape environment has become reinvigorated and contextualized. Over the past few decades, cutting-edge art trends have been mostly associated with multimedia installations along with critical breakthroughs connected with video, the Web and performance art. But the talent, technical skills and inventiveness displayed among artists in Figuring the Landscape suggest a change in the tide - painting seems to be back in vogue and full of promise and vitality.

"Painting is again proving to be the cockroach of the art world. You just cant kill it. No matter how hard you hit it with video art or installation art it rises, Lazarus-like, and twice as strong" Peter Hill, August 27, 2005 (The Age)

In Figuring the Landscape we find artists who may look back through the history of figurative realism for imagery, and/or stylization but they are not reactionary. Here is a grouping of progressive young artists, finding personal ways to push the art of painting forward.

Neo Rauch and the legendary Leipzig Academy where he was educated and today teaches is recognized as the current epicenter of this resurgence in flamboyantly brushed, populated landscape and interior scenes. His museum scaled paintings, and canvases by other talented East German born painters such as Till Gerhard are finding their way into the worlds most prestigious collections. The upsurge of interest in painterly social realism isn't just happening in what was the other side of the Berlin Wall - its quickly become a global movement. The renaissance has successfully crossed the Atlantic and taken root not just within our major cities but also many art school classrooms.