Eisenman London Show: ICE Goons and Cosmic Sublime — SkimNews
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- Nicole Eisenman returned to London with a new show at Sadie Coles gallery, following her 2023 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition "What Happened," which took its title from Hillary Clinton's account of the 2016 US presidential 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 night sky while holding — but not playing — a drum.
- Upstairs, "Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions" riffs on Philip Guston's 1969 painting "City Limits," swapping Guston's hooded clowns for goons in military fatigues and wraparound shades likened to ICE agents.
- "The Orgy," unfurling across six conjoined canvases, transforms a writhe of limbs, feet and breasts into interlocking planes of colour — described as a stubbornly physical take on mid-century abstraction à la Lee Krasner.
- The reviewer notes Eisenman suffered substantial backlash after speaking out about Israel's assault on Gaza, framing that as context for the show's ambivalence about visibility in a surveillance society.
- A new 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.
Why it matters: Eisenman's return comes after she faced professional backlash for speaking out on Gaza, and her response — pairing ICE-style satire with cosmic stargazing — captures the bind facing figurative artists today: market pressure for legible identity work versus the risk of political speech. The Royal Academy sculpture delivers the bleakest form of comedy about carrying on anyway.
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