Nicole Eisenman

A woman pushes a shopping trolley across a cracked, weed-strewn car park beneath an apocalyptic sky. In the distance, a crater has ripped through the tarmac, while in the foreground of the painting, four thuggish military types are crammed into a car. They’re helmeted, masked and donning wraparound shades. Menace tips into farce as their gun-laden belts sag to expose piggy pink builder’s bums. Welcome to the United States, 2026. 

This is Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions, one of ten new works in Nicole Eisenman’s latest show at Sadie Coles HQ on Savile Row. The French-born American artist has spent decades turning the mess of contemporary life into cartoon tragicomedy. Eisenman emerged as an artist in New York in the early 1990s, amid the AIDS epidemic and culture wars, and by the late 2000s her work had shifted from the introspective towards the explicitly political: war, recession, protest, climate crisis and the increasingly rancorous state of American public life.

This is Eisenman at her most viciously effective. Those sinister goons in the carpark aren’t explicitly identified as ICE agents, but the fistful of zip ties one of them holds suggests as much. It wouldn’t be unfamiliar territory: following Trump’s election in 2016, Eisenman began making paintings about the American right, part of a political commentary that stretches back through the Iraq War and George W Bush’s re-election and, more recently, includes the protests following the murder of George Floyd.

Eisenman can really, really paint

When canvases are this big, you need to give them plenty of time. Eisenman switches technique from one patch of painting to the next. In Parking Lot, a big white gloopy man is painted so thickly he looks like melting candle wax, awakening the childish urge to stick a finger in and squidge it around. In another of the show’s standout canvases, The Waiter, the hulking, moss-covered stones of Stonehenge sit beneath a toy-box cosmos, a universe of hovering planets and pinprick stars rendered in marbled, frictionless strokes of colour. If the prehistoric rock pile usually looked this good, I too would be slowing down to gawp at it on the A303. 

Crucially, it works because Eisenman can really, really paint. Her figures can be cartoonishly distorted, but their world is the one that we inhabit. The grotesquery isn’t an escape from reality; rather a way of making reality look as strange as it feels these days.

Less convincing, perhaps, are the more abstract, shape-based paintings on show, which move away from the allegorical scenes for which Eisenman is so celebrated, and fall a little flat (in more ways than one). The same goes for the two rather nondescript sculptures in the upstairs room, whose presence feels oddly unexplained. If you want to see Eisenman the sculptor at her best, head instead to the Royal Academy courtyard, where her just-unveiled, gloriously bonkers eight-metre tower of bodies, barrel, potato and cat confirms why she is one of the most celebrated artists working today.