ESSENTIALLY: A term used to broadly categorize and describe artwork depicting objects, places or people found in the real world.
ETYMOLOGY: From the Latin figurare meaning 'to form or fashion.'
EXAMPLE: Movement No. 10, Marsden Hartley, 1917

Between 'figurative' and 'abstract,' it is possible to describe all works of art. Figurative works represent the physical forms of objects, places, animals, things and people. It's a common misconception that the term refers only to works that depict human figures, but even a still life or landscape depicting something inanimate is considered figurative. Artworks in this category can be rendered in any style (some even bordering on abstraction) as long as they illustrate discernible things.

For most of history, figurative artworks were the vast majority of works created (especially in the West) were figurative artworks–at least before the widespread introduction of abstract art in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, it is worth noting that experiments testing the boundaries of what figurative art could look like were happening well beforehand.

Though non-figurative art was originally considered avant-garde, not all avant-garde art is non-figurative. Take the works of Picasso's cubism or Monet's impressionism, which still depict (highly stylized) versions of real things. The same can be said of Marsden Hartley's Movement No. 10 from 1917. In this work, Hartley took the classic still life and rendered traditionally fleshy pieces of fruit and hunks of cheese with an angularity that would dominate the art of the period. Today, young artists like Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Jingze Du and Tina Schwarz continue to redefine how people think of figurative, straddling a fine line between it and abstraction.

FIGURATIVE

DECODE:

FIGURATIVE