Nicole Eisenman’s art is a lesson in what can be achieved if you are adventurous, alert and unafraid. The confidence and daring of her paintings and sculpture keep tripping you up as you move through this wonderfully queer sprawl of an exhibition. With walls of framed drawings, with drawings made directly on to the gallery wall, with a hilariously mordant video booming out sardonic snatches of art world conversation, with parades of paintings and galumphing sculptural tableaux, Eisenman keeps you fascinated, obsessed with what she’ll get up to next.
Spilling over with jokes, social observation and satire, touching vignettes and piles of writhing bodies, nothing is too silly, too bawdy, too trashy, too raunchy or too difficult to attempt. Orgiastic scenes of female empowerment and male castration? Check. Giving birth while being hanged? Why ever not. The painter’s ennui and scenes of loving intimacy? Natch.
Eisenman’s heterogeneous art – with its medley of styles, and different degrees of finish, modelling and articulation – is as erudite as it is fun. Bondage fantasies meet the Northern Renaissance, and Marvel Comics superhero The Thing gets a poison pen letter telling him he’s a loser. Eisenman makes him look both glum and angry. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and late Philip Guston, caricature and realism, Manet, Renoir, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the mask-like heads of Belgian artist James Ensor are all grist to Eisenman’s mill, queering our readings of them all, quoting and riffing and making them all belong to our time, not theirs.
Eisenman is a painter of modern life, great at portraying hands holding cigarettes, lighters and mobile phones, not to mention a girl on a train tapping at a laptop while her cat curls up beside her in a travelling basket. A Guston blob-head is alarmed by a hovering drone, and someone else gets dumped by text message, suddenly shame-faced and bewildered in the reflected glow of their phone.
Filled with contextual jumps, and what could be seen as category errors, Eisenman orchestrates differences with an eye to giving the viewer unexpected pleasures and insights. She has developed a great sense of when to use material weight, when to leave things plain, when to veil and when to make things grounded in the material world. The lumpy and the illustrational meet the spiky and the bloated. Clumsiness and slobby behaviour have their place in art as well as life.
As a sculptor, Eisenman constantly returns to the blocky head on a plinth, bashed-up by experience, and the figure floundering in the clay from which it was formed. Her sculptures have a grim and stoic fortitude that borders on the tragic. You don’t know whether to empathise or laugh. Parodic and self-mocking, Eisenman pulls back from disaster at every turn. Gaucheness and grace, vulnerability and embarrassment are all in there.
Eisenman paints the family dynamics at a Passover meal (if this scene was in a novel, it would go on for pages), and a woman reverting to bewildered baby on the analyst’s couch – check the books ostentatiously displayed on the analyst’s shelves, and the blatantly phallic vase with its single wilting daisy. The details proliferate, all grounded in experience. I love the way Eisenman paints a river of scurrying rats and a tangle of roadside weeds, and a sloppy end-of-the-night drunken kiss on a bar-room table. The seedy neon of the bar sign is picked out in a sludgy piping of thick paint.
Every element is painted with a sense of the particular: the lightness of a patterned shirt, the glow trapped in an empty beer bottle, the weary barman at his counter, and the sweaty mashed-together faces joining on the sticky tabletop, the heaviness of one girl’s arm as it lolls over the other’s shoulder. Everything carries a precise physical, mental and emotional weight. Eisenman gives us the intimacy and the desolation.
Especially thrilling is the way she keeps finding new ways to do things. She depicts a painter as a werewolf at full moon, hairy handed, with animal talons, sprouting whiskers and a bulging fixated eye, staring at the canvas she is working on. Painters have always depicted themselves at work. Aside from Eisenman’s subject matter, which has got something to do with a painter’s craziness when they’re in the zone, this is a painting filled with tricky pictorial jokes and their solutions.
This electrifying retrospective, called Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, also shows the artist recording her own life and surroundings, the painter’s progress, from early success and the exhilaration of collective New York lesbian life in the 1990s, through periods of slump and revitalisation, to the complexities of the present. Shifts in the broader political landscape keep crashing in. The painter is not immune, and the jokes get darker, till they’re not funny any more. Thick, turd-like clouds cross the suburban sky as people wade like the undead through the economic swamp.
Eisenman uses paint itself to comment on the darkening American situation. Post 9/11 New York, the vanities of artists hanging out in a Brooklyn beer garden, the protests after the police murder of George Floyd, real wars and culture wars – they are all in there. Nothing for Eisenman is off limits, as we go from “what happened?” to “where next?”
Nicole Eisenman: What Happened is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, from Wednesday until 14 January.
