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Sadie Coles HQ, LondonAbstract, humorous yet deeply unsettling, the painter’s dazzling exhibition sees her caught between distant skies and the ugly reality on the ground
Nicole Eisenman’s 2023 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery took its title from Hillary Clinton’s account of the 2016 US presidential election: “What happened.” With its absurdist riffs on contemporary American life, the show confirmed that Eisenman is among the most important artists of her time and that “what happened” was a disaster. So her return to London might be thought of as a sequel, with the working title: “So what do we do now?”
Eisenman is justly celebrated for her rambunctious, magpie and irreverent subversions of the conventional histories of art and society. A painter who has lately (and successfully) turned to sculpture, her work often places people in situations – ranging from crowded bars to town squares flooded with mud – that match broad humour to sharp technique in reflecting on how our identities are shaped by the company we keep. And yet my first thought on entering Sadie Coles’ gallery was the artist had turned her back on the world.
The ground floor is dominated by a vast painting of a solitary figure standing alone amid the ruins of Stonehenge. Identified by the title as The Waiter, he looks up to a night sky teeming with the wonders of the universe and holds a drum but does not play it. The painting is overwhelming, not only for its scale but also for its dazzling variety of tones and textures, from the schematic design of the planets to its impasto treatment of the moss on the stones, which blooms from the surface of the canvas in wild green clumps. The effect is sublime.
Yet this image of a musician struck dumb by nature is also unsettling. Has Eisenman retreated from the public arena to wait things out in cosmic speculations? Is she the latest artist to join the flight from reason, seeking refuge in the dubious consolations of New Age mysticism? The neighbouring canvas shows an astronomer alone beneath a sky through which the Milky Way slices a star-studded diagonal. Behind her are low-rise apartments through the illuminated windows of which cartoon figures can be seen eating, embracing, squabbling. Again the impression is of a woman who has averted her gaze from the mess of humanity to make beautiful pictures of the more trustworthy heavens.
I was happy to be brought back to earth. In the upstairs gallery, Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions, the title of which saves me some descriptive labour, riffs on Philip Guston’s 1969 painting City Limits. Where Guston shows his hooded clowns roaming around in an absurdly small car in search of somebody to lynch, Eisenman has replaced them with goons in the military fatigues and wraparound shades beloved of ICE agents, pimpled white arses riding up out of their trousers. If the comment on contemporary US society is clear, then British viewers might also be reminded of the recent images of paunchy men standing in ragged formation as some ex-private schoolboy exhorts them to avenge their feelings of inadequacy on those who cannot defend themselves.
Set in an apocalyptic landscape overseen by a comic-book monster, the painting proposes righteous anger as an alternative response to “what happened”. Hedonism is another, and one long associated with the end of empire. Unfurling across six conjoined canvases, The Orgy is a remarkable compositional achievement, transforming a writhe of limbs, feet and breasts into interlocking planes of colour that never allow the eye to settle. Like a stubbornly physical take on the more lyrical visions of mid-century painters such as Lee Krasner, it conjures the momentary escape (from the world, from the self) that sexual ecstasy affords.
Hands at the edges of this orgy clutch at the rippling bedsheet as if preparing to draw a veil over the scene, and it is notable that the only other direct depiction of human companionship (Me and G under the J) is also framed by a painted curtain. The device reminds the viewer that the artist retains the right to block their gaze into the lives of others. That feels consistent with a more general ambivalence about the function of images in a surveillance society, in which to be visible is to be vulnerable (a fact not lost on Eisenman, who suffered a substantial backlash after speaking out about Israel’s assault on Gaza).
Another response to the predicament, hinted at by two sculptural installations on the theme of dance and a jangling cubist portrait, is to embrace abstraction. There would be a certain irony if Eisenman, who emerged when socially conscious figurative painting was widely accepted to be dead, should take that path now that the wheel has turned. But abstraction might offer some relief from the market’s demand that artists today produce easily legible expressions of their own (and their communities’) identity, not to mention their ideological commitments. When artists are being blacklisted, you can understand the appeal.
If this show finds the artist at a crossroads, uncertain of what road to take next, then who doesn’t feel that way? A couple of hundred yards down the street, a sculpture by Eisenman has been unveiled in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. It shows the bent-backed artist carrying the world on her shoulders. Unlike Atlas, however, her world comprises a gigantic barrel of wine, an oversized potato, the artist’s leaping cat and, on top of it all, the late British sculptor Phyllida Barlow. The artist staggers forward, one hand wrapped around a stick, the other holding out a glass in the faint hope of catching a drip of wine from the barrel. This is the bleakest and best form of comedy. The artist can’t go on, she’ll go on.
Nicole Eisenman is at Sadie Coles HQ, Savile Row, London until 21 November and the courtyard of the Royal Academy until 5 February