Exploring 30 Years of Nicole Eisenman’s Rich Figurative Work

The MCA exhibition has a special selection on view including paintings on canvas, mixed media on paper, and sculpture. In some of her work dating from the early 1990s, the artist’s interests and inspirations seem more evident as the paintings in question include a multitude of figures not unlike the paintings made by the Mannerists, but here the artist uses various shades of a singular color in elaborate scenes. With titles such as Trash’s Dance (1992), Artforum (1993), and Lemonade Stand (1994), these three examples feature monochromatic tones ranging from shades of pink, grey, and blue and a landscape of bodies. 

This modality of working with many figures in a what feels like a small space is also relevant once again in The Abolitionists in the Park (2020-2021) which the artist made during the pandemic in reference to friends and family who protested after George Floyd’s murder in support of Black Lives Matter. The work is on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and features a selection of people sitting in a park, clustered together with only a small section of ‘ground’ (in this case a blue picnic blanket) visible.

In true Eisenman fashion, figures vary wildly from being rendered in a representational manner to having more cartoonish visages. The work documents a time in our recent history that is not soon to be forgotten. 

“Based on memories and experience rather than press photographs, The Abolitionists is a very rare contemporary history painting, and a remarkable achievement,” wrote Mark Godfrey in his extensive catalogue essay. “Whereas Eisenman had chosen to fictionalize Trump supporters, she populated this scene with several recognizable individuals, [Hannah] Black, [Tobi] Haslett, [David] Velasco, and writers Sarah Nicole Prickett and Jasmine Sanders among them.” The central figure is Hannah Black, a British visual artist, critic, and writer who stares out from the canvas, unabashedly meeting the gaze of the viewer. 

Installed largely in chronological order, What Happened invites all present into Eisenman’s mind which delves into the deep philosophical struggles of our time but not always without humor, evident specifically in some of the works on paper. Two of these include Shit My Lips Are Chapped (1995) in the newspaper comic style of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy and Alice in Wonderland (1996) which features a costumed Wonder Woman and a cartoonish likeness of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel standing underneath the superhero, her head disappearing between muscular legs. Eisenman seamlessly weaves a narrative between sexuality and politics, realism and pop art, and various art histories resulting in an encounter that is historic in its own right. 

Eisenman, who was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2015, has given a voice to the LGBTQI community since she started painting. Evidenced in many of the works on view including Sloppy Bar Room Kiss (2011), which shows two seated women, their bodies bent onto a table, lips locked and Morning Studio (2016) where two women lie on a chaise lounge one with yellow skin wearing a grey t-shirt and pants, stretched over her shirtless, bare-breasted partner and an ashtray full of cigarettes nearby.

The artist has always presented the queer experience without reservation, and teeming with intimacy. While ever present, the subject is only a part of a conceptual whole that bends and twists over time and feels just as important as Eisenman’s relationship with technology. In Long Distance (2015), we see a figure from the back wearing a yellow baseball cap and a black-and-red plaid shirt staring at a computer screen, while another, in repose on a bed, stares back. 

In Drone Painting #1 (2018), a figure in profile with close-cropped hair and huge eyes controls a drone that hovers nearby and raises questions about surveillance. The way that the artist composes our experience with technology, it’s evident that the digital age is both necessary and a distraction. 

In a recent conversation with curator Jadine Collingwood, Eisenman shared that she has “an interest in allegory and how to transmute large stories into symbolic images." She continued, "A lot of this work comes out of a history of political cartoons, but how to do that and infuse it with something more personal.” With a fresh lens, What Happened offers the opportunity to move through thirty years of work in one afternoon.