NICOLE EISENMAN

Her drawing ‘Raising the Man Flag 1987 – 2002)’, on loan from the Collection of Beth DeWoody, is an iconic representation of her drawings from this period that took a fantasy community of Amazon women as a point of departure for a series of works that feature strong women capturing men, sometimes castrating them, aggressively inflicting violence and taking control. The work featured shows a group of these strong naked muscular women who have bound and tied a man who hangs from the end of large pole. The artist has been quoted as speaking about the way Michelangelo painted women by working from male models and then amplifying their feminine aspects—she has said they ‘they were as close as I could see in culture to trans-masculine bodies.’ These Amazonian women are painted with a musculature that seems to reference Michelangelo’s painting technique but amped up for the artists contemporary imagining. They exert their power, enacting a kind of revenge fantasy on the male figure who is strung up to be hung, while the composition quite clearly echoes the famous Marine Corps War Memorial that depicts the raising of the American Flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 2915.

One of the most important figurative painters working today, Nicole Eisenman explores the human condition in paintings, drawings, and mixed-media sculpture. Her works are full of tenderness and dark humor, often populated with emotionally resonant, cartoonish figures with outsized hands, a clear indicator of her work and her style. She paints herself, her family, friends, and characters in scenes that might be imagined but that have deep sense of art historical composition. Energetic, painterly flourishes and intense colors are key aspects of her paintings which focus on figures who lounge dreamily or move through space with calm and contemplative countenances. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Eisenman was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2015 and was included in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial in 2019. Eisenman’s paintings have been acquired for the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, among other institutions.