Eric Fischl
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fischl was
born in New York City and grew up on suburban Long Island;
his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1967. His own web
site describes him as growing up " against a backdrop of
alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image
over content."His art education began at Phoenix College,
then a year at Arizona State University, then California
Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he
earned his BFA in 1972. He then moved to Chicago, taking a
job as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art.His own
website recounts, "It was in Chicago that Fischl was exposed
to the non-mainstream art of the Hairy Who. 'The underbelly,
carnie world of Ed Paschke and the hilarious sexual
vulgarity of Jim Nutt were revelatory experiences for
me.'"In 1974, he took a job teaching painting at Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, where he met painter April
Gornik, with whom he moved back to New York City in 1978 and
later married. Fischl worked and resided in New York City,
but has recently moved to Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York
with his wife, landscapist April Gornik, where they share a
home and matching studios. In addition, he is a senior
critic at the New York Academy of Art.
Fischl has embraced the description of himself as a
painter of the suburbs, not generally considered appropriate
subject matter prior to his generation. Some of
Fischl's earlier works have a theme of adolescent sexuality
and voyeurism, such as Sleepwalker (1979) which depicts an
adolescent boy masturbating into a children's pool. Bad Boy
(1981) and Birthday Boy (1983) both depict young boys
looking at older women shown in provocative poses on a bed.
In Bad Boy, the subject is surreptitiously slipping his hand
into a purse. In Birthday Boy, the child is depicted naked
on the bed. In response to 9/11, Fischl debuted his work
Tumbling Woman at Rockefeller Center in New York, creating
controversy since it reminded the viewers of people falling
from the World Trade Center. When asked about the
controversy in an interview, Fischl still felt "confused and
hurt by it. It was an absolutely sincere attempt to put
feelings into form and to share them, and it was met with
such anger and anxiety in a way that used to be reserved for
abstract sculpture, really." Fischl felt people were
mourning the building more than the people since there were
so few bodies but such a high body count, which he felt was
wrong.
In 2002,
Fischl collaborated with the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld,
Germany. Haus Esters is a 1928 home, designed by Mies van
der Rohe in 1928 to be a private home. It now houses
changing exhibitions. Fischl refurnished it as a home
(though not particularly in Bauhaus style, and hired models
who, for several days, pretended to be a couple who lived
there. He took 2,000 photographs, which he reworked
digitally and used as the basis for a series of paintings,
one of which, the monumental Krefeld Project, Bedroom #6
(Surviving the Fall Meant Using You for Handholds) (2004)
was purchased by Paul Allen featured in the 2006 Double Take
Exhibit at Experience Music Project, where it was juxtaposed
with a much smaller Degas pastel. This is by no means the
first time Fischl has been compared to Degas. Twenty years
earlier, reviewing a show of 28 Fischl paintings at New
York's Whitney Museum, John Russell wrote in the New York
Times, " Degas sets up a charged situation with his
incomparable subtlety of insight and characterization, and
then he goes away and leaves us to figure it out as best we
can. That is the tactic of Fischl, too, though the society
with which he deals has an unstructured brutality and a
violence never far from release that are very different from
the nicely calibrated cruelties that Degas recorded."
