New works by Eric Fischl  always get my attention. He’s  an amazing artist, and it’s been fun to watch his  style develop over the years. He’s a painters’ painter, and these new works are no exception.  His oil paintings are wonderful constructions that use a painterly method to deliver a sense of psychological realism that pervades his work.  He is at once painterly and  precise – a hard combination to master, yet one with which Fischl seems completely at home.

I have not seen the new show, but it looks to be composed of his chromecoats from 2000-present.  The chromecoats are wonderful paintings that lack the sophisticated finish of Fischl’s oil paintings.  These look to be fast sketches that seek to capture the imprint of these scenes.  The subjects seem to stem from his 2006 series, Scenes From Late Paradise or could possibly be the studies from which he composed those paintings.  Either way, these wonderful paintings stand on their own as masterful works.  The loose gesteral quality only highlights Fischl’s incredible use of composition and painterly form.  His ability to represent so much information with a wonderfully playful use of stroke, line and negative space are a testament to his mastery of the brush.  Jenny Saville no doubt owes Mr. Fischl a lot, as do we all.

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Bio

Born in New York City in 1948, Eric Fischl grew up in the suburbs of Long Island , his parents having moved there shortly before his second year.”Safer place to raise a family”, they used to say. Against a backdrop of alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image over content, Fischl became focussed on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said. Until the late 70′s, suburbia was not considered a legitimate genre for art. With his first New York show at the Edward Thorp Gallery, epithets like “psycho-sexual suburban dramas” became velcroed to his disturbing images of dyfunctional family life.

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February 16th, 2009 Subscribe to the RSS feed!