Nicole Eisenman is the most inventive U.S. painter working right now

One of our most celebrated living artists is the subject of a superb retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2024/04/19/nicole-eisenman-what-happened-chicago/

https://archive.ph/vhXNH



If Nicole Eisenman were not there to make them acquainted, the paintings she makes in the morning wouldn’t recognize those she makes in the afternoon. Her artworks, the subject of a glorious career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, feel like determined exercises in how to bear the complexity of her own mind. Her prime method is dark humor. But there’s plenty of room, too, for righteous anger, tenderness and love.



Eisenman, 59, is our most inventive and irreverent — and often times our most startlingly intimate — contemporary painter. Her style is really several styles, across several media — not just painting but also printmaking, collage and sculpture. Her best-known works combine strains of socialist realism (both parodic and sincere) with cartoons, caricatures and flattened stylizations derived from modernist abstraction. She paints elaborate political allegories, intimate depictions of loneliness and screen dependency, and beautiful, at times breathtakingly ambitious pictures of parties, protests and gatherings in beer gardens.



At first, as you watch Eisenman switch between modes, something about the performance can feel hammy, like a costumed reenactment of a 19th-century séance. But the drama deepens, the hammy-ness mysteriously dissolves, and you can’t look away. Eisenman likes to work on a large scale and to pack her pictures with detail. A connoisseur of textures and colored patterns, she is alive to all the different varieties of work that paint can do in any given composition. She uses the paint’s facture not only to seduce but also, on occasion, to repel, converting the promise of sensuousness into ashes in the mouth.



Heads are important to her. One gallery at the MCA is filled with them, executed in every conceivable style and medium. Important, too, are toes and hands, often bulbously enlarged, cartoonlike, peculiarly foreshortened and made to do all kinds of psychic work. You can feel the influence of scores of artists behind what she does. The ones that came most often to my mind in Chicago were Max Beckmann (his taste for crowded compositions and allegory), Marsden Hartley (Eisenman’s huge sculptural installation explicitly honors him), Philip Guston and Neo Rauch.

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