Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman is a visual artist living and working in New York City.

Nicole Eisenman’s work is an inspired and gleeful deconstruction of conventions in art and society and questions social models, above all by reversing female and male role clichés. At the beginning of the 1990s Nicole Eisenman made a name for herself with monumental murals and large-scale drawing installations in tune with her generation of artists who, in contrast to the dominance of photography and language in the work of their predecessors, established painting and sculpture as central to their personal vocabulary.In 1993 and 1994 she took part in two exhibitions that, independent of each other, took place in the ICA London and in New York¹s New Museum and the Wight Art Gallery in California under the title Bad Girls, which presented so-called feminist positions in works that Marcia Tucker in the catalogue to the exhibit describes as: 'irreverent, anti-ideological, nondoctrinaire, nondidactic, unpolemical and thoroughly unladylike.' Sue Williams, Nicola Tyson, Collier Schorr, Zoe Leonard, Helen Chatwick are only several of the names that bear mentioning in this context.

Eisenman’s narratives of grotesque reformulations of social orders or her depictions of human individuality are always interspersed with possible failure or scenic breakdown: the pictorial content, the painting procedure and the message contradict each other, deal with a state of decline in historical as well as current conventions. The work "Dysfunctional Family" (2000) shows a deceptive idyllic family: a baby looks with despair at its excrements; papa smokes a pipe and mama lasciviously opens her thighs.

In her drawings and especially in her large-scale installations with works on paper and the most diverse materials, the artist often includes herself. In 1995 she took part in the Whitney Biennial with a large mural (Exploding Whitney) that showed the museum in ruins and with an installation of drawings entitled "Whitney ŒBuy Any Ol¹ Painting Sale".

The work "Progress: Real and Imagined" (2006) is a monumental painting in two parts, populated by diverse scenes of civilization's ideal and catastrophic cases, with Biblical echoes, cave men, ghosts, hunters and gatherers, wars, trade, destruction, violence and flying hamburgers.

Faye Hirsch wrote in "Art in America":

"Eisenman's brand of satirical realism, her narrative ambition and her skill as a muralist--she has completed monumental wall drawings every other year or so since her emergence on the art scene in 1993--1ink her to the American scene painters of the Depression era" ... "Eisenman embeds her theme in visual culture past and present, exploiting to great effect the dissonance that has become her particular stock in trade. Whether to skewer art-world politics and intellectual trends or to pay back-handed compliments to the past, Eisenman takes aim at the masters--Picasso, Tiepolo, Hogarth, et al.--from her redoubt in a dyke punk milieu."

Collaborating with A.L. Steiner and Laurie Weeks, The artist publishes' the zine 'Ridykeulous', in which she introduces the works of other artists.

Her work is shown at [http://vielmetter.com/ Susanne Vielmetter Projects] in LA, Leo Koenig Gallery in NY and Barbara Weiss Gallery in Berlin.

She is included in many museum collections including the Kresge Art Museum, [ [http://205.234.169.45/galleryguide/artist/21855/8373/6080/nicole-eisenman/ Kresge Art Museum website] ] The Museum of modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Denver Museum, SF Museum of Modern Art, The Hessel Museum, The Ludwig Museum.

References

External links

* [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n2_v32/ai_14559382 "ArtForum" review]
* [http://www.leokoenig.com/artist/view/443 "Leo Koenig View Works]
* [http://vielmetter.com/artists/Eisenman/nicole_eisenman.htm"Susanne Vielmetter view works]
* [http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/nicole_eisenman.htm"Saatchi Gallery View Works]