In Scarsdale: Artist Talk with Nicole Eisenman

Internationally-renowned, Scarsdale-bred painter, sculptor and printmaker, Nicole Eisenman, will discuss her work at Westchester Reform Temple.

A painter, sculptor and printmaker, Eisenman’s work ranges from the absurd and irreverent to the abject and meditative. Drawing on sources as divergent as classical mythology and the visual conventions of the art historical canon, her imagery offers a forthright, at times comedic and critical, and invariably probing meditation on contemporary life. Eisenman’s uncanny capacity for capturing human joy, pain, embarrassment, and ecstasy unites the disparate subject matter.

Nicole Eisenman is currently the subject of a mid-career survey exhibition Dear Nemesis: Nicole Eisenman 1993-2013, organized by the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, and now at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Her work is also featured in Manifesta 10, curated by Kasper König, at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Eisenman was awarded the 2014 Anonymous Was a Woman Award and the Carnegie Prize for the 2013 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. The artist lives and works in New York.

Eisenman’s work will hang at WRT into January, and presentations or trips to see her work in nearby museums will be planned for November and December.

Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965, Verdun, France) earned her B.F.A. in 1987 from Rhode Island School of Design. Eisenman’s work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, NY; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Studio Voltaire, London; The Tang Museum at Skidmore College, NY; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland; and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, among others. Her paintings and monotypes have been included in numerous group exhibitions including The Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum, New York; and Whitney Biennial (2012) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Currently, Eisenman’s work is the subject of the traveling mid-career survey Dear Nemesis: Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013, organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. She has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2014), the 2013 Carnegie Prize, the John Simon Guggenheim Grant (1996), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1995), the Louis Tiffany Grant (1995) and the Penny McCall Foundation Grant (1995). Her work resides in prominent public collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn.

Laura Hoptman has been a Curator of contemporary art in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art since 2010. Since joining the museum she has organized Isa Genzken: Retrospective, the first American survey of this artist’s work; Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, a group exhibition of contemporary art dealing with language, Carol Bove: The Equinox; Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly, and, with Peter Eleey, a mid career survey of the work of the Los Angeles painter Henry Taylor at MoMA/PS 1. Previously, she was Senior Curator at the New Museum where she organized Unmonumental: The Object in the 21rst Century, The Generational: Younger Than Jesus and monographic exhibitions on Tomma Abts, Elizabeth Peyton, Brion Gysin and George Condo. In 2004-05 she was the director of the 54th Carnegie International, and in an earlier incarnation as a drawing curator at MoMA from 1996 to 2002, she curated the first U.S. museum exhibitions of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, and Luc Tuymans among others. In 1997, at MoMA she was the co curator of Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, a show that reintroduced Kusama to international audiences and in 2002, she organized Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, a landmark exhibition of contemporary figurative drawing.

Hoptman is also organizing a group exhibition on the subject of contemporary painting, and a mid career survey of the Cologne artist Kai Althoff. She is also part of the team which will organize a retrospective of the work of Bruce Conner in 2016.

This exhibit is generously supported by Marty and Rebecca Eisenberg.