NICOLE EISENMAN

If Untitled is a show about what Eisenman has been doing for two or three years, it is also a show – the clearest demonstration yet–of what they have been doing for three decades: building a world where life and form can finally have it out.

Edie, who is Eisenman’s two-year-old cat, appears severally throughout the show, getting beastlier with each incarnation: first as a kitten whose curiosity causes a hero to collide with his Destiny; later as a symbol–who knows?–of figuration’s ninth life. In her final form (Crazy Cat, (2022)), Edie is all head and no body, molded out of clay and cast in bronze, weighing nearly 400 pounds: a wrecking ball lying in wait.

At the heart of the exhibition is Maker’s Muck (2022), a representation of the creative process that is thoroughly evolutionary in spirit. An outsized plaster figure sits hunched over a potter’s wheel, on which a mound of ersatz clay interminably spins. The floor teems with sculptures. Some of the pieces are fully rendered and recognisable: owl, kouros, ketchup bottle. Others are either unfinished or beyond done, i.e. abstracted. A few are still little lumps. (Evolution is not in fact linear.)

A lone figure–perhaps no figure in Eisenman’s oeuvre has been as lone–in The Ledge (2022) looks less like a body than like a walking (not talking) stick. The black box that makes up the whole of the foreground in Reality Show (2022) is what some people call a television; it is also what B.F. Skinner called the human mind. Synecdoche serves this artist well: ‘When you can’t think of what to draw,’ they’ve said, ‘draw a head.’ Meaning: the head stands in for the thought. Or vice versa? Eisenman’s heads are getting bigger.