Nicole Eisenman
Sex und Death
Sex und Death
$275,000
2022
Oil on linen
50.8 x 40.6 x 2.5 cm / 20 x 16 x 1 in
67.9 x 57.2 x 5.1 cm / 26 ¾ x 22 ½ x 2 in (framed)
Diptych 20 x 16 x 1 in each
As one of the most prominent figurative painters today, Nicole Eisenman’s paintings depict layers of nuanced thoughts and feelings—whether personal, social or political—that expose the paradoxes and contradictions of the human experience. Her work is narrative and playful, a collision of life and form by way of allegorical and abstracted figuration.
Known for her multi-figure compositions and symbolic portraits, Eisenman has revisited certain characters and motifs throughout her career. Death is a familiar theme in Eisenman’s work, often revealing a tenderness in the artist’s otherwise dark sense of humor. Key examples of this are in her painting ‘Death Playing Checkers’ (2003), where Death is deep in thought over a board game in a pastoral scene, and ‘Death and the Maiden’ (2009), where it is pictured consoling a friend over a glass of red wine. In both works, the grim character sits opposite a semi-nude figure, suggesting both an intimacy with death and the coexistence of emotions and experiences. ‘Sex und Death’ (2022) explores the confluence of sexuality and mortality once more, this time paying tribute to the themes with individual portraits hung side by side.
Eisenman has experimented with a variety of visual languages in her practice, playing with distorted proportions and cartoonish interpretations of figure’s hands, feet or noses. In discussing Eisenman’s success in creating these distinguished figures, Stephen Knudsen notes, ‘It comes down to the old but useful cliché: knowing how to draw informs good distortion… Eisenman exercises those skills in Expressionistic idiosyncrasy: soul bearing, reckoning with absurdity, and acknowledging the joy, pain, embarrassment and ecstasy of being human.’ [1]
About the artist
Nicole Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Her work was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, 2019 Whitney Biennial, and 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster in Münster, Germany. Having established herself as a painter, Nicole Eisenman has expanded her practice into the third dimension.
Portrait of Nicole Eisenman © Nicole Eisenman. Photo: Nathan Perkel
Artwork images © Nicole Eisenman. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer
1.) Stephen Knudsen, ‘Nicole Eisenman. The Relevance of 21st-Century Expressionism,’ Art Pulse, June 1, 2014.