Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist recognized for her figurative oil paintings that explore themes of sexuality, comedy, and caricature. Besides painting, she creates installations, drawings, etchings, lithography, monotypes, woodcuts, and sculptures.

Biography of Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman, born in 1965 in Verdun, France, where her father was stationed as an army psychiatrist, is of German-Jewish descent. Also, her great-grandmother was Esther Hamerman, a Polish-born painter.

In 1970, Eisenman's family relocated to Scarsdale, New York, where she spent her childhood. She earned a B.F.A in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987 before moving to New York City. Eisenman taught at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson from 2003 to 2009.

Eisenman has received the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), and the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has been featured in the Whitney Biennial three times (1995, 2012, 2019). She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015, for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."

Eisenman's sculptures have been exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale, the 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster, and the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

The artist co-founded the queer/feminist curatorial initiative Ridykeulous with A.L. Steiner. In 2022, Eisenman's work was featured in the exhibition "Women Painting Women" at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.