Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman by Nicole Eisenman, Beatrix Ruf, Lynne Tillman, Laurie Weeks, and Nicola Tyson

Harcover: 96 pages

Nicole Eisenman is a contemporary artist, best known for her paintings (though she also works in installation, printmaking, and sculpture), and a 2015 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. This book came out in 2011 and features many handsome reproductions of Eisenman’s paintings and drawings from the mid-90s to about 2010. Check out this book to look at the paintings, of course, but you’d be remiss to skip the writing, which includes an introduction by the editor/curator Beatrix Ruf, an interview with the artist, and a short story.  In the interview, conducted by the author Lynne Tillman, Eisenman talks about her approach and evolution as a painter, and the early influence of art history on her work  – particularly Italian Renaissance and Gothic art. She points out how she built from the ruins of these traditions, imbuing them with her specific world of characters, abjection, subconscious desires, and importantly, humor. She also addresses feeling constantly disappointed by feeling forced to define herself and her paintings in terms of gender, when to her, “all in life and painting is fluid.”  Speaking about her newest paintings at the time, she explains how she reassessed her formal approach, deciding to become more painterly and less controlling – that is, to let the paint itself claim as much or more meaning than the image. This changing approach can be seen in the range of paintings featured in the book. The author Laurie Weeks provides a surreal and hilarious meta-story about writing a story for a Nicole Eisenman book, in which the author and her cohorts pontificate on the artistic and political implications of Eisenman’s work, and totally eviscerate capitalism and patriarchy in the process. I enjoyed it immensely and can’t think of a better introduction to the paintings in this book. Recommended!

 - Aleta L.