Human Figure

Sculptor Judith Reifman believes that art should transport us for a time beyond our daily lives. She sees "Cathedral," her installation of 26 carved wood figures at the Sherry Frumkin Gallery, as a sanctuary for dreaming. The figures--male, female and hermaphrodite, some of them 12 feet tall--provide "a moment . . . to be transformed and to see something differently," Reifman said. "I put the emphasis on the human being, yet within natural materials.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has ushered in the Easter season with a gem of an exhibition, "The Passion of Christ in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts," which compresses a vast swath of art history and religious literature into one small room. All the drama, terror, pain and grief of Christ's last days are spelled out in minutely detailed artworks designed as private devotional objects.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. --Arthur C. Clarke After more than a decade of inflated promises and disappointing performances, computer graphics are finally assuming a significant role in mainstream filmmaking.

Achair clothed in ceremonial garb. A sensuous woman made of barbed wire. An ancient archeological site illuminated by neon. These are some of the works San Fernando Valley art galleries will be showing in the next few months, when irony will be on full display. Other highlights include drawings of voodoo ceremonies, sculptures made of demolished building parts and vases from 5th Century BC Greece. The clothed chair--made of black wood and draped in kimonos and elaborate jewelry--is part of a group show titled "Furniture as the Artist's Subject," which opens Jan. 21 at the Century Gallery in Sylmar.

In his first American exhibition Korean sculptor Jung Yong Chaing shows the human figure, nude and unadorned, dancing against the cutting restraint of a tightly wound cord. The small and beautifully proportioned female bodies cast in bronze are reminiscent of Robert Graham's idealized nudes, but Chaing's figures are more animated and alive.

After an exile lasting several generations, the human figure has been fully welcomed back into art. Although many artists never gave up on recognizable renderings of the human body, their claim to the cutting edge of art had been supplanted by painterly abstraction and the crisp geometries of minimalism. When the figure did appear in pop art, it was unreal, remote, a figment of popular imagination or a facade polished for the press.

Sculptor Roland Reiss, art department chairman at Claremont Graduate School, perceives a return to an age-old subject in art: the human figure. "There has been a renewed interest in the figure in the last 10 years," Reiss said in an interview at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, where "Expressions of the Human Figure," a competitive art exhibit, opens tonight. The 7 to 11 p.m.