Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Her work was included in both the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and in February 2021 she is opening an exhibition at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo.

Other recent solo exhibitions include Baden Baden Baden, at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, Germany; and Al-ugh-ories, at the New Museum, New York. Having established herself as a painter, Nicole Eisenman has expanded her practice into the third dimension.

The figurative visual language of Nicole Eisenman’s art is allegorically charged. Often – as most recently in her sculpture “Procession” at the Whitney Biennial 2019 – caricature-like allusions are made to social ills, especially under the Trump administration: placed on the terrace of the museum, several bronze and plaster figures, which understood themselves as typifications of American topoi and were commandingly robbed of their authority by Eisenman, went on trial here. Just as, for example, a blind general can be read as an emblem for irresponsible political leadership, a wounded eagle seems to be a symbolic attack on the heraldic bird and thus the ethical foundations of the United States.

Accordingly, the title of the edition “Monster Movie” can be taken quite literally: in Eisenman’s Ditone print on paper, which was produced exclusively for “Texte zur Kunst,” that which society rejects and represses appears as a mask-like face reminiscent of classic man-machine depictions, as those in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” or in B movies, whereby outsiders are just as much in the center as the supernatural and occult. Originating, as it were, from the realm of monsters and mutants, the frayed edge of the paper not only points to the limits of humanity. Its haptics also crosses the boundaries between painting and object, making “Monster Movie” a hybrid artifact: a familiar stranger.