Nicole Eisenman is a contemporary American artist known for her inventive, figurative painting and sculptures. Utilizing bright colours and wry subject matter, Eisenman’s complex paintings tackle tropes of Western art history. The artist gleans inspiration from a variety of sources, including queer culture, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Maria Lassnig. “She doesn’t passively genuflect in front of art history,” the critic and curator Massimiliano Gioni wrote. “She resurrects it and camouflages it into our present.” Born 1965 in Verdun, France where her father was stationed as an Army psychiatrist, she grew up in Scarsdale, NY went on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. Eisenman has participated in the 1995 and 2012 Whitney Biennials, was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, and won the MacArthur Grant in 2015. Her works are in the collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Kunsthalle Zürich, among others. Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
