One of the most significant artists working today, Nicole Eisenman works fluidly across figurative paintings, prints, and sculptures, and focuses on the affective, expressive potential of the human form. Fusing art historical references, lowbrow humor, and political engagement, they combine satire and anxiety to explore the individual and collective pathos of the human condition.
Nicole Eisenman’s diverse practice, which early on also included installations and video, is rife with historical allusions and often humorously undermines male-centric, misogynist, and homophobic narratives. The epic bronze sculpture Man at the Center of Men , which was first featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, epitomizes Eisenman’s radically indeterminate and open approach to making narratives and allegories about the human experience. Shown on the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 6th-floor terrace, Man at the Center of Men was a central element of Procession , the artist’s 2019 installation of eleven disparate figures.
Standing as an uncanny monument to the precarious experience of life in the 21st century, Man at the Center of Men features a figure sunning their face with two reflective trashcan lids while being carried on the back of another figure. This bonded pair suggests myriad possible interpretations from reflections on the abject conditions that make possible the experience of privilege and leisure to the entanglements and obligations of mutual aid, generosity, and exploitation. Neither separate nor mutually exclusive, this expanded possibility of meaning highlights the ineffable experience of being human—grief and terror exist alongside joy and abundance.
Nicole Eisenman was born in 1965 in Verdun, France, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1987. 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.
