Eric Fischl

A leading member of a group of artists who returned to figuration in the 1980s, Eric Fischl is an American painter and sculptor whose works explore the complexities of suburban life and the human condition. Fischl’s art is celebrated for its provocative, narrative-driven imagery that often delves into themes of sexuality, domestic tension and social discomfort.

Born in New York in 1948, Fischl grew up in a suburban environment in Long Island, which significantly influenced his artistic perspective. He attended Phoenix College in Arizona before transferring to the California Institute of the Arts, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1972. Fischl’s early exposure to the stark contrasts and underlying tensions of suburban life would become a recurring motif in his work.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fischl gained prominence with his provocative figurative paintings at a moment when many critics declared that the genre had long been dead. Along with artists such as David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Fischl harnessed the raucous energy of the era’s club and music scene and produced a new, vital form of art that captured the powerful excitement of New York’s downtown art world. This Neo-Expressionism resulted in bold, dynamic, and often socially or politically subversive paintings, infused with a sense of dynamism that has been absent from art for a generation.

Fischl’s paintings often capture moments of vulnerability and unease, juxtaposing the mundane and the taboo. His use of light and shadow, combined with his keen eye for detail, adds to the emotional intensity of his compositions. Fischl’s subjects include holidaymakers, beachgoers, couples and families in a domestic scene, and characters sourced from the artist’s archive of captured images during his travels. Fischl’s 1982 work The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog is a major canvas from a series inspired by a trip he took to St Tropez. The painting sold at Christie’s New York in 2022 for US$4,140,000 – a world auction record for the artist.

Throughout his career, Fischl has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and more. His works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, among others.