Is figuration in contemporary art rising from the ashes once again? Even if former edicts on media’s or language’s death and resurrection have proven flawed due to art’s endemic ebbs and flows, recent exhibitions, market data, and literature show an arc of mounting interest in representational work consolidating after the end of Zombie Formalism in the mid-2010s. The following roundtable, gathering figures varyingly tangled in this phenomenon—gallerist Rózsa Farkas, curators Elise Lammer and Lydia Yee, and artists Megan Rooney and Katharina Wulff—aims to outline its features and underlying forces.

When I got on the phone with Caroline Bachmann to discuss 58 av. J.-C., the exhibition she opened at Kunsthaus Glarus, in March 2020, the first thing she told me was that she had just returned from a hike on the Napf, a mountain between Bern and Lucerne that, according to her, looks exactly like a skirt. After having successfully hiked through each pleat, she reached the top and could contemplate the entire Swiss alpine panorama. Describing herself as a very rational artist, it took me some time to realize that this anecdote is actually an excellent entry point to understand her approach to painting—namely, as a tireless quest to disentangle the medium while testing the semiotic potential of representation.