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Lot Essay
Eric Fischl invests his suburban narratives with a sense of menacing psychological urgency that dramatizes the disparity between the idealized media image and the reality. Using motifs that he has either experienced or taken from the mass media, he describes the disintegration of confidence in a lifestyle predicated on order and comfort. Behind the “happy housewife," the “girl-next-door,” and the “young executive’ Is a lonely woman, an awkward teenager, and an insecure man.
Fischl imbues the visual clichés of our advertising culture — beach resorts, baseball games, clothing stores — with an aura of disquiet. His scenes are fragments wrenched from a larger narrative whole and thereby provoke the viewer to complete the story. Because so many of the situations depicted are uncomfortably private, we feel that we are intruders: for example, in the painting Bad Boy of 1981 (private collection), a teenaged boy reaches stealthily into a purse while in front of him, on the bed, lies a nude woman (possibly his mother) unaware of his presence. In another work, Inside Out (collection of Elaine and Werner Dannheisser, N.Y.) we see a couple making love in front of a home-video camera; the man is preoccupied with his own Beta-Maxed image.
It is not only the content of these scenes that conveys a disturbing impression. Through minor shifts in scale, unusual perspectives, and compressed spaces, Fischl upsets the equilibrium of standard realist depictions. In Year of the Drowned Dog, a composite work consisting of six colored etchings, he stresses the physical as well as psychological distance between people gathered on a public beach.
The separate panels — each containing a landscape segment or figural anecdote — may, if the owner chooses, be fitted together to form one continuous overlapping image. The juxtaposition of figures and landscape and the time of day are, however, not perfectly synchronized, implying that something is amiss. Though more reticent than previous work, this radiant, sundrenched coastal view with its rather acid National Geographic colors has at its heart a grim subject. A drowned dog Is observed by three small figures for whom this is a tragic event. One of them crouches over the dead animal and touches it. Their dark skins, their tropical or “primitive” clothing, and their concern for the dead animal suggest that they are natural inhabitants of this tropical paradise. in contrast, the bathers at the right and the naval personnel in their white clothing — all apparently detached observers or indifferent to the death of the dog — seem to be outsiders. As the artist has said: ‘Dreadful things often occur in beautiful light, which makes the event more intolerable.”
Nancy Spector, The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p.112
Fischl imbues the visual clichés of our advertising culture — beach resorts, baseball games, clothing stores — with an aura of disquiet. His scenes are fragments wrenched from a larger narrative whole and thereby provoke the viewer to complete the story. Because so many of the situations depicted are uncomfortably private, we feel that we are intruders: for example, in the painting Bad Boy of 1981 (private collection), a teenaged boy reaches stealthily into a purse while in front of him, on the bed, lies a nude woman (possibly his mother) unaware of his presence. In another work, Inside Out (collection of Elaine and Werner Dannheisser, N.Y.) we see a couple making love in front of a home-video camera; the man is preoccupied with his own Beta-Maxed image.
It is not only the content of these scenes that conveys a disturbing impression. Through minor shifts in scale, unusual perspectives, and compressed spaces, Fischl upsets the equilibrium of standard realist depictions. In Year of the Drowned Dog, a composite work consisting of six colored etchings, he stresses the physical as well as psychological distance between people gathered on a public beach.
The separate panels — each containing a landscape segment or figural anecdote — may, if the owner chooses, be fitted together to form one continuous overlapping image. The juxtaposition of figures and landscape and the time of day are, however, not perfectly synchronized, implying that something is amiss. Though more reticent than previous work, this radiant, sundrenched coastal view with its rather acid National Geographic colors has at its heart a grim subject. A drowned dog Is observed by three small figures for whom this is a tragic event. One of them crouches over the dead animal and touches it. Their dark skins, their tropical or “primitive” clothing, and their concern for the dead animal suggest that they are natural inhabitants of this tropical paradise. in contrast, the bathers at the right and the naval personnel in their white clothing — all apparently detached observers or indifferent to the death of the dog — seem to be outsiders. As the artist has said: ‘Dreadful things often occur in beautiful light, which makes the event more intolerable.”
Nancy Spector, The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p.112