Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial (1995, 2012, 2019). On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."Eisenman lives in Brooklyn.

Nicole Eisenman was born in 1965 in Verdun, France where her father was stationed as an army psychiatrist. She is of German-Jewish descent; her great-grandmother was Esther Hamerman, a Polish-born painter.

In 1970, Eisenman's family moved from France to Scarsdale, New York, where she spent her childhood. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a B.F.A in painting in 1987. She then moved to New York City.

Between 2003 and 2009, Eisenman taught at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

Eisenman's figurative oil paintings often toy with themes of sexuality, comedy, and caricature. Though she is known for her paintings, the artist also creates installations, drawings, etchings, lithography, monotypes, woodcuts, and sculptures. With A.L. Steiner, she is the co-founder of the queer/feminist curatorial initiative Ridykeulous. Eisenman's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023