Reverberations between the historical and the present, between publicness and privacy provide the force behind Nicole Eisenman’s paintings and sculptures. Her antenna for the dynamics of contemporary life lead her to the inexorable truth that the world remains filled with evil men driven by power, gluttony, avarice, bloodlust, and their belief in money as a value to be held above all others. In her sculptural works at the Arsenale, Eisenman represents these forces as monstrous, distorted and twisted, eviscerated and cancerous. Her steadfast commitment to the details of our moment, as seen in works such as Weeks on the Train (2015), Morning Studio (2016) and Dark Light (2017) – the iPhones, jeans, hoodies, laptops, baseball caps, and the use of milk crates as furniture – places her firmly in the venerable tradition of realism and genre scenes: pictures where the membrane that separates art from life is rendered as porous as possible.
