This past summer, Kay Eisenman, his widow, a retired environmental planner, was preparing to sell the place and move across town into what Nicole described, in her mother’s hearing, as “a really cute apartment building for all the little old ladies in Scarsdale whose husbands pass away.” Her mother gave her a look. Their father, Sheldon Eisenman, a psychiatrist, died in 2019. Center for Public Health and Disasters Josh is a digital-advertising producer. David is now a doctor who runs the U.C.L.A. On Eisenman’s visit to the suburbs, she was wearing orange-and-blue rubber sandals, Nike shorts, and an old T-shirt showing a cat tearing at a painting of a sailboat, along with the words “Clawed Monet.” After she and her two brothers, David and Josh, left home, in the nineteen-eighties, their parents stayed on in the house. They were embroidered with the shrug emoticon: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Not long ago, as gifts for her assistants and her family, she had some “Eisenman Studio” baseball caps made. She reports on intrusions and obstacles, but not on the end of the world. (She spoke to me, at different times, of her admiration for Karl Ove Knausgaard, Wisława Szymborska, and Don DeLillo.) But her art is animated by a generous, sometimes goofy earnestness, so that a viewer-even in the face of work that is dark, or hard to parse, or both-can often extract some quiet encouragement to keep trudging on. Her depictions of melancholy and decay claim space often occupied by serious writing. Terry Castle, the critic and essayist, once wrote that Eisenman’s art captures “the endless back-and-forth in human life between good and evil, tenderness and brutality.” “Coping,” a 2008 painting in which people stroll, and meet for drinks, on a small-town street that is thigh-high in mud, or shit, could lend its title to many Eisenman works. But the peace and domesticity, the late-morning chore-you understand the feeling.” In a recent conversation, Eisenman said, of Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker,” “ That’s an old technology. Partly because Eisenman’s creations often trouble to notice how the world looks now, and won’t look forever-a man in Adidas slides a laptop on the train-they seem likely to survive long enough to carry into the future a clear sense of our present. Her work tells stories of broad political inequity-“Huddle” (2018) conjures a surreal and sinister gathering of white men in suits, high above Manhattan-and, more intimately, of solitude and of solidarity, at the beach and in the back gardens of bars. Eisenman, who is fifty-five, constructs figurative, narrative images filled with angst, jokes, and art-historical memory.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |