From Publishers Weekly
In 1979, Eric Fischl unleashed an uproar with his large-scale oil painting Sleepwalker, which depicted a teenage boy masturbating in a kiddie pool. As more than one essay points out in this slender catalogue of 30 years of the American artist’s work, the art world assailed not the figure’s behavior but the figure itself. Van Tuyl has assembled writings by Peter Schjeldahl, Carolin Bohlmann and Annelie Lutgens, among other scholars and critics, that delve into Fischl’s artistic development. The lively, accessible essays discuss his focus on the body, preparatory use of photography, shifting qualities of light, snapshot affinity for fleeting moments, and the scandalized outcry when Fischl rejected conceptualism and abstract expressionism for unabashed narrative. An interview with the artist proves him to be candid and articulate about his oeuvre and painting in general. But it is the work itself—the early glassine overlays, the now famous suburban tableaus, multi-paneled paintings from the mid-80s, images from India and Rome, and deceptively simple watercolors—that is most eloquent, speaking to deeply private experiences of alienation, shame and mystery as told by a gestural style rich in contrast and color. This volume takes the measure of a vital contemporary artist and a contentious moment in American art history. 63 color and 30 b&w reproductions.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Eric Fischl is the first great painter of the U.S. in national decline. His morally ambitious, tragi-comic images reflect the frittering away of American expansiveness, American economic and cultural swagger, American star turns on world stages. After a decade of pace-setting for U.S. visual arts--projecting local projects as universal goods--the U.S. has in Fischl a major artist so homegrown in root and branch as to be practically untranslatable. --Peter Schjeldahl
In the 1980s, American painter Eric Fischl mercilessly captured moments in the lives of the American middle classes. Among the painters of his generation, which most notably include David Salle and Julian Schnabel, Fischl is widely recognized as engaging particularly intensely with this typical national theme. As Fischl himself tells it, painting is a process that turns thoughts into feelings, and that uses form and color to create meaning: "...That is always what I am doing now when I paint: making meaning." Fischl's urge to go beyond formal painterly parameters and to allow subjectivity and content onto his canvases links him to younger painters like Luc Tuymans and Elizabeth Peyton, painters credited with a revival of the medium. In the 1990s, Fischl found new impulses and topics: foreign culture, religious rituals, age, and death now take center stage in his compositions. The motifs in his most recent series are based on digitally manipulated photographs of a sparsely furnished room. This catalogue presents an overview of Fischl's work, illustrating approximately 45 paintings and an equal number of drawings, all made between 1979 and 2001.
In the 1980s, American painter Eric Fischl mercilessly captured moments in the lives of the American middle classes. Among the painters of his generation, which most notably include David Salle and Julian Schnabel, Fischl is widely recognized as engaging particularly intensely with this typical national theme. As Fischl himself tells it, painting is a process that turns thoughts into feelings, and that uses form and color to create meaning: "...That is always what I am doing now when I paint: making meaning." Fischl's urge to go beyond formal painterly parameters and to allow subjectivity and content onto his canvases links him to younger painters like Luc Tuymans and Elizabeth Peyton, painters credited with a revival of the medium. In the 1990s, Fischl found new impulses and topics: foreign culture, religious rituals, age, and death now take center stage in his compositions. The motifs in his most recent series are based on digitally manipulated photographs of a sparsely furnished room. This catalogue presents an overview of Fischl's work, illustrating approximately 45 paintings and an equal number of drawings, all made between 1979 and 2001.
Essays by Carolin Bohlmann, Jörg S. Garbrecht, Annelie Lütgens, Peter Schjeldahl and Victoria von Flemming. Interview by Frederic Tuten.~Preface by Gijs van Tuyl.
Hardcover, 9.75 x 11.5 in./136 pgs / 63 color and 30 b & w.
