Art Fair Paintings: Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. His artwork is represented in many distinguished museums (including the Met and the Moma) throughout the world and has been featured in over one thousand publications. His extraordinary achievements throughout his career have made him one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

 

Born in 1948 in New York City, he grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. He began his art education in Phoenix, Arizona where his parents moved in 1967. He attended Phoenix College and earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts in 1972. He then spent some time in Chicago, where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1974, he moved to Halifax where he taught painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Fischl had his first solo show, in Nova Scotia, 1975, before relocating to New York City in 1978.

 

Looking at Looking

 

Or… looking at people looking at paintings and… at people. Eric Fischl made his reputation in the 1980s with large-scale figurative oil paintings depicting ambiguous, erotically charged scenarios set in the American suburbs. He has always been a keen observer of the relationships between people, and between people and their surroundings. The «Art Fair Paintings» demonstrate the artist’s acute observation of body language and the small details that reflect social relationships, particularly in the heady environment of the art fair, known for its charged atmosphere of Financial and cultural capital. A world Fischl described as : «… What I’ve discovered as I moved into this work is the essentially abstract nature of the art fair spaces. They are nearly cubistic in their flatness and their jarring collaged constructions. … For a painter, It is a rich environment to try to capture. Layers of consciousness on top of layers of cross-purposes. I am falling in love with It. …»