What are the characteristics and relationship between representation and expressive art?

Representational art refers to the art of truly reproducing people and things in objective social life in works. The so-called "reproducibility" refers to object art, landscape art, and installation art, which have objective reproducibility or direct presentation, and are real objects that can be taken at hand. To put it bluntly, it focuses on realism.

Expressive art focuses on the expression of the internal subjective world, and expresses the artistic theory of the external objective world indirectly or tortuously through the internal subjective world. Artistic creation is collectively referred to as expression theory and expressive art. In layman's terms, it focuses on the inner processing and expression of the outside world.

Representation and expression, as two basic methods of artist creation, have been debated endlessly by artists in historical theoretical research on literature and art. Representation and expression are not only a pair of basic contradictions in art appreciation, but also a fundamental contradiction in artistic creation. A pair of basic contradictions has an extremely important impact on the artist's artistic creation.

Extended information:

"Representation theory" can be said to be "deep-rooted" in the history of art theory, and the "imitation theory" in the theory of the origin of art laid a theoretical foundation for it.

The ancient Greek philosopher Mocritus believed that "art is an imitation of nature. From spiders we learned to sew; from swallows we learned to build houses; from orioles we learned to sing."

Aristotle is an affirmer of representationalism. He said: "Comedy always imitates people who are worse than the people we have today, and tragedy always imitates people better than people we have today."

The method used by expression theory is abstraction. Abstraction refers to extracting the most essential attributes of things and then conveying them.

This process can be clearly understood from the paintings of Picasso, the originator of the Liben School of painters. Its representative image of a bull has been drafted more than ten times, from the more realistic image at the beginning to the last few lines.

Source: Baidu Encyclopedia - Representational Art