In mid-January, more than 200 art objects were unpacked at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; 120 of them were Nicole Eisenman’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. The museum has organized the artist’s largest survey show to date, “Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013,” and the timing’s impeccable. Eisenman was chosen for the Whitney Biennial for a second time in 2012, and last year, she won the Carnegie International. Her Carnegie exhibit was also a survey show, with older paintings and several new plaster statues. While her figures echoed the color and materials of the Greco-Roman statuary on the mezzanine, they were far more expressionistic and waggish—yet as the Pittsburgh City Paper noted in a review, they somehow still “rhymed” with them. Eisenman’s an artist, it noted, who manages to “connect with art’s endangered traditions, while thumbing her nose at them. She manages to have it both ways.”
“She is a voracious reader and a voracious viewer,” says Kelly Shindler, CAM’s associate curator and the organizer of “Dear Nemesis.” “She’s always looking to other artists…for instance, I know the Renaissance is very important to her.” By way of example, Shindler mentions Eisenman’s The Triumph of Poverty, a painting that plays off of a 16th-century lithograph. Painted in 2009 following the financial crash, the work combines contemporary images (e.g., an empty-looking suburban house; a brown Ford Fiesta decorated with patchwork patterns, perhaps hinting it’s about to fall apart at the seams, like everything else) with older archetypes, including a Depression-era bum in a wilted top hat. His pants are down around his ankles, his posterior turned round to the front. It’s a visual pun: “Ass-backward,” Shindler explains. A clutch of rats scuttle around his feet, and he holds a length of string attached to a group of tiny, tumbling Dutch figures.
“It’s an allegorical painting, of course, but there are so many different figures—there are people that she knows in these paintings,” Shindler says. “She’s always bringing in her familiars into the work. I see a picture of a baby here that may be her son, for example. She’s probably in here as well. I think also her use of color, especially from this time, is worth mentioning, because it’s just spectacular. If you look at this piece, the colors of the figures’ faces are really unusual—they’re chartreuse or magenta or blue…you can see the joy in her painting style. It’s all there—the technique is there, the history and the imagery and the narrative, it’s all there together. And it coheres really amazingly well.”
Eisenman’s masterful use of color, superior draftsmanship, and fluidity across mediums is rare. So is her unabashed expression of humor, as well as her fearlessness in speaking her mind politically, often from a queer, feminist point of view. The Carnegie show included a painting called Fishing, depicting a man strung up over a hole in the ice, surrounded by a group of women in white snowsuits and furry brown boots.
“There’s a companion painting to Fishing called Hunting, which you’ll see in the show at CAM,” Eisenman says. “There is a mob of women hunting for these two guys whose helicopter is downed in the Arctic—you see the helicopter crash in the background, and the guys sitting there dazed and confused, and this pack of huntresses coming up behind them. It’s just sort of a playful fantasy, and it’s meant to be funny,” she says. “At the same time, it’s coming from a place of real sadness and anger about how women are treated in the world. It’s always like two steps forward, one step back—and lately, a lot of steps back.”
To better illuminate the activist arm of Eisenman’s practice, Schindler says, she invited Eisenman and artist A.L. Steiner to install a project by the Ridykeulous collective, a radical curatorial project the two founded together in 2005. “Readykeulous by Ridykeulous: This is What Liberation Feels LikeTM,” installed on the museum’s mezzanine, is a salon-style hang of angry letters from 40 artists, including Donald Judd, Kara Walker, Tracey Emin, David Wojnarowicz, Jack Smith, Nancy Spero, and Ad Reinhardt; there are also materials from the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University’s Fales Library. The show, which was listed as one of The Daily Beast’s “20 Most-Anticipated Art Exhibits in 2014,” expands still further on March 7, when a video component opens in The Front Room. It’s based, Shindler says, on a piece of the Carnegie International that featured a gallery of ’80s and ’90s video art. “They’re going to present their own version,” Shindler says, using the same types of AV carts and cube monitors, but showing video art by feminist artists including Sadie Benning, Dawn Frasch, and Howardena Pindell.
“It’s a pretty rad show,” Eisenman says. “There’s a lot of words, a lot of letters to read, but it is, I think, pretty entertaining. It’s kind of like a visual smorgasbord; there’s so much radical stuff in there. The videos are in keeping with that. It’s all very feminist, and political, and radical, and great.”
“Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013” is viewable in the Main Galleries at CAM (3750 Washington) through April 16, along with “Joyce Pensato: I KILLED KENNY” and Ron Gorgov’s “Serapis.” For more information, call 314-535-4660 or visit camstl.org.
