Eisenman returns to London with cosmic paintings and ICE goons — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Nicole Eisenman returns to London with a new exhibition at Sadie Coles gallery, framed as a sequel to her 2023 Whitechapel Gallery show "What happened," which borrowed its title from Hillary Clinton's account of the 2016 election.
- The ground floor is dominated by The Waiter, a vast painting of a solitary figure amid the ruins of Stonehenge gazing at a star-filled sky, which the reviewer describes as "overwhelming" and "sublime" but also "unsettling."
- Upstairs, Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions riffs on Philip Guston's 1969 "City Limits," replacing Guston's hooded clowns with goons styled like ICE agents in military fatigues, wraparound shades and "pimpled white arses riding up out of their trousers."
- The Orgy unfurls across six conjoined canvases, described as a "remarkable compositional achievement" and a hedonistic vision tied by the reviewer to "the end of empire."
- Eisenman suffered a "substantial backlash" after speaking out about Israel's assault on Gaza, a detail the reviewer connects to her broader ambivalence about being visible in a surveillance society.
- A separate Eisenman sculpture unveiled in the Royal Academy's courtyard depicts the bent-backed artist carrying a wine barrel, an oversized potato, her leaping cat and the late British sculptor Phyllida Barlow on her shoulders.
- The reviewer frames Eisenman at a crossroads, suggesting abstraction as a possible refuge from the art market's demand for easily legible expressions of identity and from the blacklisting of artists.
Why it matters: Eisenman is widely regarded as one of the most important figurative painters of her generation, and this London return signals her swinging between political confrontation (the ICE-style goons) and cosmic withdrawal (the Stonehenge stargazer). The show's ambivalence about public visibility is sharpened by the reviewer's disclosure that Eisenman herself took real heat for speaking out about Israel's assault on Gaza.
Ask SkimNews
