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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsNicole Eisenman is the most inventive U.S. painter working right now
One of our most celebrated living artists is the subject of a superb retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2024/04/19/nicole-eisenman-what-happened-chicago/
https://archive.ph/vhXNH
If Nicole Eisenman were not there to make them acquainted, the paintings she makes in the morning wouldnt recognize those she makes in the afternoon. Her artworks, the subject of a glorious career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, feel like determined exercises in how to bear the complexity of her own mind. Her prime method is dark humor. But theres plenty of room, too, for righteous anger, tenderness and love.
Eisenman, 59, is our most inventive and irreverent and often times our most startlingly intimate contemporary painter. Her style is really several styles, across several media not just painting but also printmaking, collage and sculpture. Her best-known works combine strains of socialist realism (both parodic and sincere) with cartoons, caricatures and flattened stylizations derived from modernist abstraction. She paints elaborate political allegories, intimate depictions of loneliness and screen dependency, and beautiful, at times breathtakingly ambitious pictures of parties, protests and gatherings in beer gardens.
At first, as you watch Eisenman switch between modes, something about the performance can feel hammy, like a costumed reenactment of a 19th-century séance. But the drama deepens, the hammy-ness mysteriously dissolves, and you cant look away. Eisenman likes to work on a large scale and to pack her pictures with detail. A connoisseur of textures and colored patterns, she is alive to all the different varieties of work that paint can do in any given composition. She uses the paints facture not only to seduce but also, on occasion, to repel, converting the promise of sensuousness into ashes in the mouth.
Heads are important to her. One gallery at the MCA is filled with them, executed in every conceivable style and medium. Important, too, are toes and hands, often bulbously enlarged, cartoonlike, peculiarly foreshortened and made to do all kinds of psychic work. You can feel the influence of scores of artists behind what she does. The ones that came most often to my mind in Chicago were Max Beckmann (his taste for crowded compositions and allegory), Marsden Hartley (Eisenmans huge sculptural installation explicitly honors him), Philip Guston and Neo Rauch.
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Nicole Eisenman is the most inventive U.S. painter working right now (Original Post)
Celerity
Apr 20
OP
NNadir
(33,587 posts)1. Wow! Great Stuff! I was unfamiliar with her. Thanks for the heads up.
Celerity
(43,771 posts)2. YW, my fellow pro-nuclear power friend
NNadir
(33,587 posts)3. Why thank you again. You know what I like about this picture?
It's that the people in the picture are young, fighting against what we did to them, fighting for a sustainable world, fighting ignorance.
Bless their souls...
Good for them, good for everyone.