NICOLE EISENMAN

She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Her work has been included in numerous important solo and group exhibitions, including in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. The artist’s solo exhibition What Happened at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany (2023), travelled to Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2023) and MCA Chicago, Chicago, IL (2024).

Early life and education

Nicole Eisenman was born in Verdun, France, and grew up in the suburban setting of Scarsdale, New York. She studied fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, spending a formative year in Rome. After graduating in 1987, Eisenman moved to New York City, becoming a central figure in the art scene, experimenting across media and further developing a distinctive figurative style.

Practice and key artworks

Eisenman’s work draws on art history, comics, pornography, advertising, and popular culture to explore feminism, queer life, and the politics of everyday experience. She works across ink, gouache, oil and acrylic paint, printmaking, and sculpture, often staging crowded scenes in which allegorical and archetypal figures coexist with intimate portraits of friends, lovers, and selves. Her oeuvre is distinguished by its interplay between contemporary subject matter and art historical influences.

A breakthrough came with Self-Portrait with Exploded Whitney (1995), an imposing mural shown at the 1995 Whitney Biennial that depicts the artist painting on a lone wall amid the rubble of the Marcel Breuer building.

In the 2000s they developed her well-known ‘Beer Garden’ paintings, including Biergarten at Night (2007), in which groups of contemporary drinkers—many of them her friends—are shown socialising in Brooklyn’s beer gardens. Rendered in acidic, unnatural colours that evoke both fauvism and impressionist social tableaux, for example Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1876 painting, Bal du moulin de la Galette, the works touch on contemporary social alienation.

From the late 2000s, Eisenman expanded beyond large crowd scenes into smaller, often humorous, psychologically charged paintings such as Going Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017) and Morning Affirmations (2018), in which she depicts a bald eagle looking in a mirror while brushing itself, most assuredly telling itself affirmations to start its day. Works like Destiny Riding Her Bike (2020) further exemplify an interest in narrative, showing a cartoonish collision between a girl on a bicycle and a man on a ladder in a dreamlike, saturated palette, which Eisenman has noted as relating to her own romantic relationships.

Eisenman’s ‘Head’ paintings and sculptures focus on close-up, constructed faces that appear to nod to Constructivism and modernist abstraction. Works such as Sun in My Eye on the Beach (2019), Head with Hat (Tiff) (2022), and Edie (The Destroyer) (2022) reduce faces and even animal portraits to interlocking planes of colour, balancing humour with psychological intensity.

Sculpture and public art

Alongside painting, Eisenman has developed a significant sculptural practice. Early mask-based sculptures gave way to ambitious figurative installations, including Procession (2019), conceived for the Whitney Biennial. This multi-figure outdoor work stages a group of allegorical walkers and stragglers, including a monumental figure dragging a cart, alluding to Western art history while undermining traditional heroic monuments.

In the gallery, Eisenman has also produced large-scale sculptural environments such as Maker’s Muck (2022), shown in a solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York. The work presents a hulking plaster figure hunched over a pottery wheel, surrounded by small sculptures in varying states of completion, proposing an absurd, vulnerable vision of artistic labour. Eisenman has also made metal and composite busts, including Econ Prof (2019), Goblin (2020), and Sailor with Cig #1 (2021), which rework the conventions of the commemorative portrait into playful, ambivalent characters.

Public Commissions

Public commissions have become an important part of Eisenman’s practice. Sketch for a Fountain (2017), created for Skulptur Projekte Münster, parodies the tradition of male statuary in public fountains by presenting a group of lounging, urinating, and reclining figures that reclaim public space for queer and female bodies. In 2021, Eisenman was shortlisted for London’s Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square.

In 2024 Eisenman was commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York, to create a major outdoor project, The Fixed Crane (2024), featuring a toppled industrial crane embellished with handmade sculptural objects. The work signified an exploration of the 20th-century concept of the ‘readymade’, created in 1916 by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp to elevate everyday, mass-produced objects to the status of an artwork, pushing the boundaries of her work in figuration.

Awards, recognition, and influence

Eisenman has received major recognition throughout their career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2015). They won the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. In 2019, they participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, further consolidating her international profile.

Eisenman’s work is included in numerous museum collections and is frequently cited in art-historical and critical discussions of contemporary figurative painting, queer art, and politically engaged realism. Eisenman’s influence extends across generations of artists interested in narrative, identity, and the social body, and seeking to explore current directions in figurative and queer contemporary art.

Exhibitions

Nicole Eisenman has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions internationally, with an increasing number of institutional surveys and retrospectives.

Key solo exhibitions include:

• Fallen Angels, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong (2026), Eisenman’s first solo exhibition in Asia.
• STY, 52 Walker, David Zwirner, New York (2025).
• Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2021–22); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023–24); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2024), a major touring retrospective spanning painting, sculpture, and works on paper.
• Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns. Heads, Kisses, Battles, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Arles (2022).
• Nicole Eisenman: Giant Without a Body, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2021).
• Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri (2014).
• Nicole Eisenman, Le Plateau – FRAC Île-de-France, Paris (2007).

Select group exhibitions include:

• This Is Not America’s Flag, The Broad, Los Angeles (2022).
• Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2018).
• The Eighth Square: Gender, Life, and Desire in Art Since 1960, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2006).

These and other projects ensure that Nicole Eisenman remains a central figure in contemporary painting, queer art, and critical figurative practices.

Instagram

Nicole Eisenman’s Instagram can be found here.

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Ocula | 2026