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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Nicole Eisenman: Sturm Und Drang

Feb 27 – Nov 15, 2020
700 Congress Ave, Austin, TX 78701, United States

“Being a queer woman is the air that I breathe, and it’s inescapable, and it’s going to be part of the work,” the New York-based artist Nicole Eisenman told The New York Times in 2016. “But I would like gender to just disappear from the face of the earth.” Since the early 1990s, Eisenman has blended the traditional—realistic figures and art-historical references culled from her privileged background—with a strain of punk-feminist-queer rawness. The work has a chaotic energy, equal parts funny and fuming, that seems to dismantle monuments as it erects new ones. Forty paintings, drawings, and sculptures, including 2019’s Procession (pulled from the Whitney Biennial in protest), journey to Texas. —C.J.F.