Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman uses figuration to examine the social and emotional conditions of contemporary life, constructing densely populated scenes in which distorted bodies and moments of dark humour expose the tensions underlying everyday experience. Her practice brings together references from Renaissance painting, social realism, underground comics and popular culture, reworking historical modes of representation through a distinctly contemporary perspective. Moving between satire and intimacy, Eisenman combines elements of tenderness, absurdity and discomfort to explore themes of identity, sexuality and alienation. Expressive surfaces and psychologically charged characters afford her compositions a heightened sense of immediacy, balancing painterly invention with a nuanced understanding of the contradictions embedded within contemporary society. 

Eisenman was born in Verdun, France in 1965, and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island, in 1987. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Carnegie Prize (2013); a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (2015); and the Suzanne Deal Booth / The FLAG Art Foundation Prize (2018). Eisenman has exhibited extensively internationally, with major solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich (2007); the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego (2014–15); the New Museum, New York (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2023); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2024). Her work has also been presented in significant group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1995, 2012, 2019); Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013); The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age at Museum Brandhorst (2015) and mumok (2016); and the Venice Biennale, Venice (2019). Eisenman currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.