New York-based artist Nicole Eisenman has addressed issues around gender, race, violence, and inequality for over three decades, in a practice that combines raw emotion with a dark humour.
Read MoreNicole Eisenman was born in Verdun, France, but spent her childhood in the leafy affluent suburban setting of Scarsdale, New York. She studied fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, during which she spent a year in Rome. There she became interested in Renaissance painting.
After graduating in 1987, Eisenman moved to Manhattan's Lower East Side, where she experimented with various mediums in the local art scene.
Eisenman explores female tropes across art history and wider visual culture, such as comics or pornography. Drawing from personal experience to connect to broader political concerns, Eisenman investigates the domains of feminism, punk, and queer and popular culture. She works in a range of media including ink, gouache, and oil and acrylic paint.
Eisenman's first major artistic debut came at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, where she presented the imposing mural, Self-Portrait with Exploded Whitney (1995). The scene depicted the artist painting on a solitary wall amidst the rubble of a collapsed Breuer building, with men fleeing the scene.
In her two-dimensional works, Eisenman typically presents figures in groups or alone, rendered in an expressionistic style in unnatural tones including sickly white, yellow, blue, brown, or red.
Eisenman's 'Beer Garden' pictures formed a significant part of her work of the 2000s. The large-scale oil painting Biergarten at Night (2007) may reflect a fauvist influence in its use of colour, while the crowded yet disconnected figurative tableau depicted echoes the works of impressionists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
From the late 2000s, Eisenman explored subject matter beyond crowded scenes, to smaller, humorous individual paintings like Going Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass (2017). Morning Affirmations (2018) shares a similarly unnatural palette.
Destiny Riding Her Bike (2020) is one of Eisenman's larger paintings, and presents a quirky, surreal scene of an accident between a girl on a bike and a man on a ladder.
Eisenman's 'Head' paintings reflect characteristics of Constructivism. Works such as Sun in My Eye on the Beach (2019) and Head with Hat (Tiff) (2022) present close-ups of distorted faces, abstracted to shapes and areas of colour. In Edie (The Destroyer) (2022), the artist applies the same treatment to her pet cat.
Eisenman has worked in sculpture, with one of her early mask sculpture series presented in 2017. For the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Eisenman presented Procession (2019). This large-scale installation contained subversive references to imagery from western art history, such as Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), and Auguste Rodin's The Thinker—who appears as a prostrate figure billowing infrequent puffs of steam from the rear.
For Untitled (Show) (2022), Eisenman's solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York, the artist presented Maker's Muck (2022). The sculptural installation comprised a malformed, oversized plaster figure hunched over a pottery wheel, surrounded by an assortment of miniature sculptures in various states of completion.
More recently, the artist has developed metal and composite busts such as Econ Prof (2019), Goblin (2020), and Sailor with Cig #1 (2021).
Eisenman has presented a series of public sculptures that parody male representation in public fountains, beginning with Sketch for a Fountain (2017) for Skulptur Projekte Münster. In 2021, Eisenman's proposal for an oversized jewellery tree was nominated for the Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square
Eisenman was the recipient of the Guggenheim Grant (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2015). In 2018, she was selected as the winner of the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize, and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The following year, Eisenman participated in the 58th Venice Biennale.
Nicole Eisenman has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Select solo exhibitions include Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns. Heads, Kisses, Battles, Fondation Vincent van Gogh, 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 Ile-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).
Nicole Eisenman's Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
