“She doesn’t passively genuflect in front of art history,” Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the New Museum, in New York City, has said of the American artist Nicole Eisenman. “She resurrects it and camouflages it into our present.” So while Eisenman’s figurative paintings and sculptures draw elements from Renaissance and Baroque art, as well as from Social Realism, they are energized by the color and kinetics of contemporary life and its conflicts. This exhibition opened at Whitechapel Gallery in London, the artist’s first major U.K. retrospective, and now comes to Chicago with over 100 works from Eisenman’s three-decade career. Paintings, sculpture, monoprints, animation, and drawings illustrate her critical and inventive way of thinking. —Elena Clavarino