In ArtForum, Nicole Eisenman talks to Brian Sholis about her new work. “During the past fifteen years,” Sholis writes, “New York-based Eisenman has created a self-aware and psychologically probing body of work that includes installations, animations, drawings, and, with increasing focus, paintings. ‘I made the paintings in this exhibition throughout the past year, gravitating, as I often do, to particular images (both found and imagined). I put them in drawings and then on canvas, initially working on one at a time and then on several at once. When selecting paintings for the show and thinking about them as a group, I realized that they are all somewhat depressed or depressing and that what ties them together is their embodiment of different notions of coping. The world can be a depressing place these days. I don�t think I�m depressed�though I did experience something akin to a midlife crisis recently�but the state of the world, and my opinion of it, necessarily filters into the work.
‘The earliest painting in the show is ‘Coping;’ it depicts people trudging through muck in a town setting, which directly preceded a revelation I had in the studio that it was time to try painting interiors. That in turn led to the canvas that depicts me in a therapist�s office. But the epiphany about painting interior spaces was less about the subject matter than it was about my need to push myself formally. I frequently paint vague outdoor scenes, like ‘Coping’ or ‘The Fagend,’ in which the figures are placed in an artificial, tableaulike environment. If you take the figures out of ‘The Fagend,’ it�s just a big bunch of abstract blocks with patterns on them. I liked that aspect and wanted to pursue it further. To do so, I debated taking the figures out of these canvases, but I couldn�t. I�m not ready�and don�t want�to make that jump. In a way, I couldn�t do it because I don�t know how else to make paintings. What would I pull from? If the figures aren�t included, these constructed worlds seem entirely removed from reality and rather self-indulgent. You need the figure�or, rather, I need the figure.'”
�Nicole Eisenman: Coping,� Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin. Through Oct. 18.
