How to Use gestural in a Sentence
gestural
adjective-
Some are nearly as gestural, as off the wall, as the ravings of @realDonaldTrump.
—Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, 26 Jan. 2017
-
The release is more gestural than actual, a bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it.
—Elizabeth Greenwood, Longreads, 31 Jan. 2018
-
The most popular emojis tend to be gestural: faces, hearts, and hands.
—Sophie Haigney, The New Yorker, 22 July 2019
-
Her color work is very good but more static and less gestural.
—Brian T. Allen, National Review, 12 Feb. 2022
-
The massive work is tamed by an assertive elegance that evokes the gestural brushstrokes of James Nares.
—Natasha Gural, Forbes, 5 May 2021
-
Get ready for a display of complex footwork and intricate gestural artistry as the kathak dancers share their skills.
—Jon Bream, Star Tribune, 27 May 2021
-
Google says that to reach slide-out menus, people using fully gestural navigation will be able to tap and hold near the edge of the screen.
—Chris Welch, The Verge, 3 July 2019
-
The allegro has gestural spans that collapse if not sustained, and these were carried over the entire work.
—Luke Schulze, San Diego Union-Tribune, 16 May 2022
-
The Dutch-American artist de Kooning used vivid hues of yellow, turquoise and crimson and a distinctive, gestural brush stroke.
—Anne Ryman, The Arizona Republic, 16 June 2022
-
Her ivory satin gowns, suits, camisoles, and trousers come with gestural, of-the-moment details like puffed sleeves and baroque pearl buttons, without a mermaid skirt or sparkly flower in sight.
—Emily Farra, Vogue, 9 Apr. 2019
-
Orlando, the show also features large-scale paintings that Robb often used his hands to paint in gestural motion and flow.
—Patrick Connolly, Orlando Sentinel, 12 May 2022
-
The pose and the placement of the hands expresses a gestural sense of the subject’s self that flows right into the dress: Michelle Obama is a wearer of clothes and an owner of arms and a woman who looks right at you, this painting says.
—Josephine Livingstone, New Republic, 12 Feb. 2018
-
As an example, the painting Between Earth and Here (2020) defines a landscape vista as a series of gestural markings.
—Matthew Bourbon, Dallas News, 28 Apr. 2021
-
If the gestural mark making suggests an open and exploratory quality, the paint itself has a weighty nature.
—Mike Giuliano, Howard County Times, 6 July 2018
-
This footage captures her exacting gestural work with fingers and arms.
—Sheila Regan, Star Tribune, 6 May 2021
-
The two earliest works here, which include the show’s namesake, are gestural in the manner of abstract expressionism.
—Washington Post, 20 Nov. 2020
-
But as a conductor Schiff affects no airs; his gestural vocabulary feels of a piece with his pianism.
—BostonGlobe.com, 19 Oct. 2019
-
Viewed up close, these marks bear a whiff of 1950s Abstract Expressionist gestural painting.
—Steven Litt, cleveland.com, 21 Jan. 2018
-
In that room, the walls are painted with gestural daubs of indigo, Delft and robin’s-egg blues, spangled with glimpses of canary-yellow wallpaper underneath, the same that still hangs in the ground-floor bathroom.
—Michael Snyder, New York Times, 29 Sep. 2020
-
The first semiofficial gestural fan language was written by a Spanish man known simply as Fenella.
—Madeleine Luckel, Vogue, 24 Apr. 2018
-
The vehemence of the Mexicans matched his volcanic temperament; and the heft of their gestural forms showed him how to rival, while evading, the tinkered unities of Cubism.
—Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 24 Feb. 2020
-
And yet Manguso addresses race and ethnicity only at the level of metaphor, and the book’s approach to class feels almost as gestural.
—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 8 Feb. 2022
-
The papers acted as a substrate onto which Venson, who is trained as a fine artist, overpainted layers of gestural brushstrokes.
—Sean Santiago, ELLE Decor, 25 Mar. 2021
-
Her stories don’t need to be grand because human experience is largely not; it is lived on the level of the daily, the conversational, the gestural.
—Hillary Kelly, Los Angeles Times, 19 Oct. 2021
-
That is why his support for the Iranian rebellion was merely gestural.
—Matthew Continetti, National Review, 17 June 2023
-
The gestural quality gave this work the look of Abstract Expressionism, but what stood out most for him was the materiality.
—Jonathon Keats, Forbes, 15 Apr. 2021
-
Soulier ties together all those odd arm and torso twists, the karate kicks, rolls and the rest of the brutal folderol through meticulous repetition, directional shifts and gestural phrases passed from one dancer to the next.
—Laura Bleiberg, latimes.com, 3 Nov. 2017
-
In the midst of a pandemic and a recession, when the ugly words and spasmodic evil deeds and gestural politics of an unfit president have led many to despair, the country may seem wide open to every kind of change.
—David Bromwich, Harper's Magazine, 27 Oct. 2020
-
The retrospective brackets this mid-career series with hard-edge abstract works from the early 1970s and a gestural painting completed this year.
—Laurie Ann Farrell, Dallas News, 27 Aug. 2021
-
But Karloff would play it with unusual emotional acuity, eliciting compassion through gestural pleas to be understood.
—Hazlitt, 6 Sep. 2023
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gestural.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Last Updated: