
COURTESY THE ARTIST/CATHY AND JONATHAN MILLER, OLD WESTBURY, NY
COURTESY THE ARTIST/CATHY AND JONATHAN MILLER, OLD WESTBURY, NY
As this show made dazzlingly evident, Eisenman is adept at turning art-historical tropes to her own humorous, feminist, and expressive ends. Amid a wall of works on paper, Man Cloud (1999), for instance, conjured Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536–41) in its depiction of an elevated mass of writhing male bodies—to which pairs of women, lounging amorously below, seem oblivious.
A group of same-size paintings recalling artists from Munch to van Gogh emphasized voyeurism as part of the artist’s role—as in one of a giant eyeball mirroring the breasts of a naked model. But Eisenman is at her best in such large-scale canvases as Sunday Night Dinner (2009), which, even as it summons both the domestic claustrophobia of Vuillard and the ghoulish faces of Ensor, captures dysfunctional family dynamics and communication breakdown in a way that feels entirely contemporary.
A version of this story originally appeared in the January 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 88.