©2012 Tang Teaching Museum.
Nicole Eisenman’s psychologically revealing work includes installations, drawings, animations, and, increasingly, paintings. Eisenman’s unique brand of humor permeates her work. Simultaneously playful, biting, and raunchy, she challenges cultural and social norms associated with gender and sexuality, popular culture, and the current art scene.
Nicole Eisenman: The Way We Weren’t features a new series of paintings that extend her perceptive social critique. Surly and melancholic figures crowd her scenes of street corners and beer gardens, drowning their shared discontent in alcohol and reveling in the anonymity of the crowd. While Eisenman’s disenchanted figures feel unmistakably contemporary, the scenes also hearken back to earlier times, recalling Impressionist and German Expressionist paintings that share a similar fascination with human interaction and isolation.
