Nicole Eisenman

Since the 1990s, Nicole Eisenman has established themselves as a protagonist of the New York art scene and remains one of the most influential contemporary artists working today. Although Eisenman has worked extensively with various mediums– including sculpture, drawing, illustration, and etching– they are best known for their figurative oil paintings. These introspective portraits put an intense focus on the individual or, in some cases, the multiple individuals that cohabitate the frame, while maintaining a larger consideration of cultural and political realities. Inspired by the great canonical painters of art history, Eisenman is nevertheless driven by an urge to chronicle modern life and is acutely attuned to the historically ingrained gender binaries, prejudices, and unconscious biases at stake in the politics of representation. Butting against – or queering – the established male canon, Eisenman's paintings at once pay homage to and challenge convention.

Eisenman was born in Verdun, France in 1965, where their father was positioned as a Freudian psychiatrist for the army. Later in life, Eisenman would fondly recall listening to their father interpret dreams, which has inspired their often-surrealist oeuvre. Eisenman currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. They are a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Notably included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, 2019 Whitney Biennial, and 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster in Münster, Germany, Eisenman’s work is consistently formally inventive and materially ambitious. They have been hugely important to generations of queer viewers, and the deep humanism of their work engages all audiences.