titlehere; A contemporary-art show in Athens may just be the exhibit of the decade.(Fractured Figure)

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian

Contemporary art is regularly accused of being self-referential, sensation-mongering, or cynically in league with popular culture. A new exhibition called "Fractured Figure," however, opening this month at the Deste Foundation in Athens, makes a strong case for art's ancient power to reflect and articulate some of the more-troubling issues of our time. All the works in the show are from the collection of Dakis Joannou, a Greek construction magnate who is one of the world's leading buyers of new art. Over the past fifteen years, Joannou has organized, together with the American art dealer and consultant Jeffrey Deitch, a series of brilliantly focused thematic shows (including "Cultural Geometry," "Artificial Nature," and "Post Human") that have defined the contemporary ethos in ways that museums, biennials, and other exhibitions around the world rarely try to do.

The theme of "Fractured Figure" is the response of some of the best artists in many countries to recent events-9/11, Iraq, genocide, international terrorism, environmental degradation-by fragmenting and fracturing the human figure in ways that suggest a profound uneasiness. The Swiss artist Urs Fischer casts his female nudes in candle wax, with a wick that is lit when the show opens; the sculptures gradually melt away during the run of the exhibition and have to be reconstituted afterward (at a cost of $60,000). The Canadian artist David Altmejd's The Giant, which stands nine-and-a-half feet high, is an eroding monster with cancerous lesions and mirror-glass elements on whose huge treelike frame taxidermied squirrels nest and climb. (Altmejd's The Giant 2, which was the sensation of this year's Venice Biennale, also belongs to Joannou and will join "Fractured Figure" when the Biennale ...