Figurative painting is back – but how good is any of it?

An oxymoron is a clever gambit in an exhibition title. The Whitechapel Gallery’s Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium is designed to trigger the reaction: ‘Radical? Figures?’ before revealing quite how radical the figure can be. But like all good marketing, it is deceptive. Figurative art may have been consigned to history by Clement Greenberg 80 years ago, but history since — neo-romanticism, school of London, neo-expressionism — has repeatedly proved him wrong.

The ten painters in this exhibition aren’t a school: the only thing their work has in common is its statement-making scale. The three-metre canvas at the entrance, Daniel Richter’s ‘Tafari’ (2001), was inspired by a news story about African migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Spain in a small boat; Richter’s over-lifesized orange inflatable dinghy threatens to slide down the wall of black water into the gallery, dumping its bilious boatload of bundled figures at your feet. In the adjacent painting, ‘HEY JOE’ (2011), two men stand heroically silhouetted against a snow-capped mountain: a Taleban fighter is giving the Marlboro Man a light.

Richter is not the only artist here with a sense of humour. Nicole Eisenman’s mural-sized diptych ‘Progress: Real and Imagined’ (2006), painted in the garish palette of a children’s storybook, is packed with surreal, even Pythonesque detail. Amid scenes of hunters in the snow and women giving birth, a giant Terry Gilliam foot has landed, while a puckish little skeleton with folded arms on the bottom left mimics the quizzical embryo in the margin of Munch’s ‘Madonna’. Eisenman sees herself as ‘a developer building 12-storey high-rise condos on the ruins of art history’: her ‘Brooklyn Biergarten II’ (2008) is an update of Renoir’s ‘Dance at the Moulin de la Galette’ with an Ensor death’s head among the crowd.