Sadie Coles

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...