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Jonathan Lasker and Ellen Gallagher both use the language of abstraction to reference the figure. It’s as if the hard fought struggle to eliminate bodily forms in the work of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko has allowed figural references to emerge fresh, and freely cavort at will. In Lasker's The History of the Boudoir, 1991, the classic image of the reclining nude is conveyed through the language of isolated color, line, and form. The baby blue background, the linear matrix, and the textured pink form suggest, in the most minimal terms, a naked woman lying in a serene room as an object for male contemplation. Blue and pink signify opposing sexes, as well as contrasting desire, while the bubble gum-like application of paint references the sticky sweetness and temporal quality of the proffered interaction. For Gallagher, a populace has been reduced to isolated eyes and lips. Gallagher’s trademark forms are taken from the minstrel tradition, which caricatured African-American facial features in black-face. In Bubbel, 2001, these orifices follow their own directions and rather than staying within the lines as they did in earlier paintings. The eyes coagulate in one corner, as if resting on a beach to watch scattered lips emerge out of an ocean of elementary school writing tablet lines. The marks have left the spaces where they were written previously, to find their own destiny.
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