How to Use figuration in a Sentence

figuration

noun
  • For the last decade or so, things have been very focused on younger artists and emerging art and figuration.
    — Degen Pener, The Hollywood Reporter, 16 Feb. 2023
  • How much did Paul’s own paintings and figuration form some thread that tugged at Freud’s mind?
    — New York Times, 20 May 2021
  • There's a lot of cartoonish figuration that pulls it somewhere else.
    — Alison Medley, Chron, 24 Nov. 2020
  • The move over the previous decade from abstraction to figuration among the avant-garde.
    — Eric Gibson, WSJ, 15 Nov. 2023
  • In fact there was no figuration at all—just a gradient that swept between a tropic green and a hospital blue.
    — Daniel Poppick, Harper's magazine, 16 Sep. 2019
  • Stonebridge’s work walks a tightrope between chaos and grace, abstraction and figuration.
    — Lee Sharrock, Forbes.com, 20 Aug. 2025
  • Here were dazzling, golden scenes of saints and martyrs, some of the most sensual figuration ever put to brush.
    — Jerry Saltz, Vulture, 6 Dec. 2024
  • Here, the artist returned to figuration, but through a radically altered lens.
    — Lee Sharrock, Forbes.com, 5 Aug. 2025
  • That’s really hard to pull off with a medium like photography that is grounded in figuration.
    — Los Angeles Times, 28 Nov. 2022
  • Part of the pleasure is how the rayographs wobble between metaphor and utensil, abstraction and figuration.
    — Zachary Fine, New Yorker, 23 Sep. 2025
  • While painting, Wong would allow glimmers of a landscape or figuration to emerge—mirages in pigment.
    — Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 9 May 2022
  • Here Bunnett turned in intricate figurations on flute while most of the rest of the band chanted urgently alongside her.
    — Howard Reich, chicagotribune.com, 16 June 2017
  • The series blends the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, and as its name suggests, struggle is a central theme.
    — Brigit Katz, Smithsonian Magazine, 28 Jan. 2020
  • The keyboard writing, with its wide melodic leaps and furious figuration, provides the stiffest of workouts for five fingers.
    — John Von Rhein, chicagotribune.com, 6 Apr. 2018
  • Still, in other ways the process had her step slightly outside of her usual vernacular—figuration, namely.
    — Marley Marius, Vogue, 24 Feb. 2022
  • But Weiss offered a rather different approach, taking a brisk tempo and running fast figurations along the full stretch of the keyboard.
    — Howard Reich, chicagotribune.com, 22 June 2018
  • For a while, his work toggled between abstraction and figuration, as if trying to chart a course between them, but the latter eventually won out.
    — Thomas Meaney, The New Yorker, 27 Sep. 2021
  • Where each of those painters walked right up to the line between figuration and abstraction, often combining the two, Weaver’s own style was highly mannered.
    — Marley Marius, Vogue, 27 Jan. 2022
  • After years as an abstract painter Guston returned to figuration in the 1960s.
    — Walker Mimms, New York Times, 4 June 2024
  • Although language is one theme, Pedrosa’s new mapping of the globe centers also on abstraction and figuration.
    — Sara Raza, Artforum, 1 Sep. 2024
  • His crib sheet has come in for its fair share of tweaking and critiquing down the decades, but that sense of the Cubist function—input figuration, output abstraction—still holds sway.
    — Susan Tallman, The New York Review of Books, 29 Dec. 2022
  • So there arose a push-pull between abstract forms and figuration (the same thing was happening in Europe) that yielded a rich variety of original work.
    — Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 28 Mar. 2017
  • But narrative figuration has slow-burned its way back to the center of art discourse maybe because its first, very long dominant turn — centuries, really — left so much unsaid.
    — Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 12 May 2022
  • Sargent House Museum Her skills with figuration, let alone portraiture, are poor.
    — Cate McQuaid, BostonGlobe.com, 25 July 2023
  • At first glance, Ayón’s moody figurations and dark, muted colors feel a world away from Alfonzo’s energetic and bold abstract scenes.
    — Douglas Markowitz, Miami Herald, 26 Feb. 2026
  • In her first show with Pace gallery in Manhattan, the Brazilian artist both experiments and returns to figuration.
    — Robin Pogrebin, New York Times, 16 Sep. 2022
  • At times, Chase and Pirler engaged in a friendly duel or competitive dance, jabbing back and forth with bursts of figuration and slivers of noise.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 27 Dec. 2021
  • New York made sense as a next step for Bowling, who became increasingly frustrated by London’s art scene and bored with figuration.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, New York Times, 11 Aug. 2023
  • His brother Arthur, who turned more to narrative figuration, is represented by two mixed media works on boards, both from 1989.
    — Claire Voon, CNN, 2 Jan. 2023
  • There’s an iconoclastic aspect to her as well, suggesting a challenge to the gods and nature in figuration that is ultimately rejected.
    — Theo Belci, Artforum, 27 Feb. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'figuration.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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