Nicole Eisenman
1965–
Nicole Eisenman moved to Brooklyn soon after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987. Since coming to prominence in the early 1990s for bold, sexually charged images with feminist themes and abundant references to art history and pop culture, she has remained central to the discourse that has developed around queer and feminist practices.
For one year, starting in August 2011, Eisenman focused exclusively on making works on paper and prints, taking a hiatus from painting. Untitled combines a complex mix of mediums, and directly references the history of twentieth-century portraiture. The subject, identifiable by his long-lashed right eye, is Alex, the violent sociopath in Stanley Kubrick’s film (adapted from Anthony Burgess’s novella) A Clockwork Orange. Tightly framed against a pitch-black, schematically rendered architectural interior, the flattened, cartoonish figure holds a glass of milk and what appears to be a pool cue. The Yankees logo on his floppy hat situates the work in a New York bar—a realm often explored by Eisenman in her recent work. When the economic recession hit in 2008, Eisenman registered its effects on those around her in scenes of barrooms and beer gardens whose occupants appear anything but jovial. Arguably, the figure in Untitled constitutes an even darker vision, its sinister reference cloaked in a highly expressive composition.
Introduction
Nicole Eisenman (born 1965) is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial (1995, 2012, 2019). On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
Eisenman lives in Brooklyn.
Wikidata identifier
Q1986987
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 13, 2025.
Introduction
American painter whose gouache and ink-on-paper works have incorporated art-historical and pop-culture references including cartoon characters in sexually explicit situations. Awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 2015.
Country of birth
France
Roles
Artist, installation artist, lithographer, painter, photographer
ULAN identifier
500124487
Names
Nicole Eisenman
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 13, 2025.
