Nicole Eisenman What Happened

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened

From drawing and painting to printmaking and sculpture, the work of Nicole Eisenman (born 1965) combines formal experimentation with wide-ranging references to art history. Her critical and often humorous commentary on the ever-changing nature of public life consistently challenges power structures and normative conceptions of gender.0Nicole Eisenman: What Happened documents the breadth of the artist's career with over 200 color illustrations, explored in 10 newly commissioned texts. Essays by curators Mark Godfrey and Monika Bayer-Wermuth survey developments in Eisenman's work since the 1990s, while Chloe Wyma considers Eisenman's recent engagements with national and institutional politics.00Exhibition: Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany (24.03. - 10.09.2023) / Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (11.10.2023 - 14.01.2024).

NICOLE EISENMAN

Nicole Eisenman

"This show marks the first New York museum survey exhibition of Eisenman's work and provides an in-depth look at the symbolic nature of the artist's most striking depictions of individuals and groups--from intimate portraits to more complex narrative scenes. One of the most important painters of her generation, Eisenman (b. 1965, Verdun, France) has developed a distinct figurative language that combines the imaginative with the lucid, the absurd with the banal, and the stereotypical with the countercultural and queer. "Nicole Eisenman: Al-ugh-ories" highlights how allegory permeates her oeuvre and how she fluidly ties the fictional to the autobiographical and the past to the present. From the outset of her career, Eisenman's investment in painting has led to frequent experimentation in other mediums, and her practice is characterized by visible shifts that mark her effort never to become too comfortable with any one approach to painting. Eisenman’s preoccupation with the figure and the complexity of its gestures and form has resulted in mesmerizing portraits of an array of characters who range from friends and fellow New Yorkers, to imagined heroines, to tragic losers. From Success to Obscurity (2004) depicts a monstrous superhero contemplating the contents of a letter it holds in its hands and alludes, perhaps, to the fragility of fame and fortune. In Hamlet (2007), a depiction of Shakespeare's beautiful and frail Danish prince with lowered sword, Eisenman ponders the possibility of a sensitive and cautious leader at a time when the US was in the final year of George W. Bush's presidency. Similarly inspired by contemporary events, the large group portrait The Triumph of Poverty (2009), painted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, is a reimagining of a lost sixteenth-century painting of the same title by Hans Holbein. "Nicole Eisenman: Al-ugh-ories" also includes one of the artist's large-scale plaster figures, which she began producing in recent years, and two new oversize wax heads made specifically for this exhibition." -- New Museum website