Heads, kisses, fights

Nicole Eisenman’s (*1965, lives in New York) work captivates through its fascination with the human condition, questions of interpersonal interaction and the precise observation of civilizational alienation processes. In her drawings, paintings and sculptures, Eisenman combines elements from pop-cultural contexts (political satire, comics) with traditional art-historical references to create a new unity.
The exhibition “Heads, Kisses, Fights” brings together works from all of Eisenman’s creative periods and focuses on images of society in which processes of alienation, isolation, but also new communal lifestyles are central in the face of major upheavals such as globalization and digitalization.
Against the backdrop of Eisenman’s artistic practice, in which various stylistic and compositional elements of historical painting become visible alongside pop-cultural influences, the exhibition combines the artist’s works with works of classical modernism from the collections of the cooperating museums. Through these selectively introduced historical works, the exhibition, together with Eisenman’s work, opens up a resonance space spanning a century, in which social upheavals are presented in their urgency, but also with hope and confidence.
Nicole Eisenman’s work was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2019, and in recent years she has had solo exhibitions at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the Secession in Vienna and The Contemporary Austin, among others. She was prominently represented in the Skulptur Projekte Münster exhibition in 2017 with “Sketch for a Fountain”. The fountain sculpture was purchased for the city of Münster in 2020.
The exhibition is being organized in cooperation with the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen and the Stiftung der Sparkasse Bielefeld.