Oh, misfortunate humanity! To be aware of ourselves is to suffer and to know it - what a grab bag of boons and curses is our lot. And oh, the resultant, urgently probing existential angst. And the horrors we commit! World War II was certainly an end of innocence to top previous ends of innocence, and that multitasking atrocity gave an everlasting permission slip for artists to stare the abyss in the face and get acquainted with its origins. It sure isn't comfortable, but it's important.

The Memorial Art Gallery's new exhibition, "Paint Made Flesh," brings together 34 figurative paintings created between 1952 and 2006 in Europe and the United States, hailing from a variety of collections and focusing on the complexities of emotional, psychological, and spiritual experience as expressed in the human body. In this show, biology is metaphor for everything intangible, and while there are many levels of beauty present, at times it gets fantastically, desperately, hideous.

The works are in oil with a few exceptions, and the curators make a point to compare the viscosity of the medium to various body fluids. This is evident in Hyman Bloom's 1952 work, "The Hull," named both for the shape created by the yawning ribcage of an autopsy subject, and to refer to the body as an empty shell. Most immediate in this piece is the spectrum of nightmarish, garish colors, an anxious beauty meant to draw you in but leave you unsettled. Then you see the hands and knife and realize what the morbid mess depicts, and it's too late - you're trapped. The information provided states that the artist's fixation on cadavers reflects his "youth in war-torn Latvia, the suicide of a close friend, and a 1943 visit to a hospital morgue where he saw autopsies performed." More than the body, what's represented on the slab is Bloom's own inquiry about the nature of death.

Talking or thinking about death is one of the most persistent taboos, and it likely always will be, because the stubborn mystery of it does not sit well with us. When so many of us avert our eyes, why do we feel a disturbing pull to keep looking? These artists were not reveling in morbidity, but examining the aching sort of beautiful terror death provokes, and trying to show us the value in the finite miracle of life.

A softer meditation on death is Eric Fischl's 1996 "Frailty is a Moment of Self-Reflection," a piece done in effort to come to terms with the then-recent death of his father. The old man walks along a bright corridor with mysterious deep blue darkness behind him. His frail figure is ghostly pale, one tentative arm out for balance, unsteady as he goes. My mother pointed out that his face is where the color - and therefore the remaining life - is, which set me thinking that this is the exact harshness of aging: just at the peak of wisdom that comes from experience and reflection, appears the onset of inevitable physical decline. Fischl is aptly trying to reconcile the futility and frustration; we must accept this loss.

In contrast, Leon Golub's "Napalm II" is an absolute criticism of the needless, monstrousness of lives cut short by war. Created in 1969, when the Vietnam ‘conflict' was not yet over, everything about this massive canvas is raw - it is unprimed, simply nailed to wall, and depicts little more than wound-covered men attempting to flee from an unseen attack. The bleeding, burned meat of the man on the ground is achieved with a thick application of acrylic paint; by horrifying us, Golub sought to expose "the brutal effects of political oppression," per the provided statement. When little more than abstract numbers tell us of the true effects of war, and the rhetorical term "casualties" is thrown around indifferently, it's up to the stout bleeding hearts to bring us a taste of cold reality.

Many of the artists were direct witnesses to the atrocities of war, but others do battle with the effects of social institutions on individuals. In Jenny Saville's (really) gargantuan "Hyphen," painted in 1999, the artist's sister hooks her chin on Saville's shoulder, creating an illusion of conjoinedness. Their adolescent faces are flushed pink, but marked with cuts and scratches, indicating the simultaneous ferocity and intimacy of siblings. What is captivating from afar is unsettling up close - smooth skin becomes thick, violently smudged brush strokes covering a roughly 8'x10' canvas. Saville focuses on physically disfigured and reconstructed female figures, who "fail to meet contemporary ideals of feminine beauty," per the wall plaque.

The conflicts between Francis Bacon (one of my long-standing favorites) and his father over the artist's homosexuality caused him to flee from his native Ireland to London, where he painted "figures in moments of despair, sexual struggle, or emotional crisis," per the provided statement. The 1955 piece "Head in Grey" is the sinister-like face of a man, disintegrating into the black background, following Bacon's technique of wiping applied paint away to create a spectral remnant of emotion, indicating "existential doubt about the possibility for human wholeness." How insurmountable the burden must have been, though free in London, to forever carry the weight of a father's disapproval and rage.

As Picasso and de Kooning clearly weren't available to talk about their paintings, there is a twist to this show's cell phone tour: local figurative painters and physicians provide insights on some of the works and the multitude of inner states made manifest on the outside. The show is at times disturbing, with humanity turned inside out in every possible way. But the last thing you can call it is irreverent.

"Paint Made Flesh"

Through January 3

Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave.

$5-$10 | 276-8900, mag.rochester.edu

Wednesday-Sunday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursday 11 a.m.-9 p.m.