Fischl, Eric

Eric Fischl, (born March 9, 1948, New York, New York, U.S.), American painter and sculptor whose work belongs to the figurative tradition.

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Fischl moved with his family in 1967 from New York City to Phoenix, where he attended art school. He then transferred to the California Institute of the Arts before moving to Chicago, where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art while continuing his studies. He joined the faculty of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1974 and then returned to New York in 1978. He later became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Science, and his work was widely exhibited.

Fischl’s first solo show, at the Edward Thorp Gallery in 1979, centred on the experience of suburbia and the darker shadows thereof, such as angst and alcoholism, topics not often addressed in painting and for which he received some criticism. Some of his early work was done on nonconventional media, such as chromecoat and glassine paper; he also worked in traditional formats such as oil on canvas and watercolour.

In the late 1980s he turned to sculpture, favouring small bronzes at first and then producing larger, even monumental pieces, such as his memorial to the tennis player Arthur Ashe (2000) in Queens, New York. His sculpture Tumbling Woman (2002) generated some controversy when it was first exhibited: commemorating the bodies that had so recently fallen from the World Trade Center in the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, it was felt to touch too raw a wound.

Meanwhile, Fischl continued his painting practice, often depicting famous friends in such affluent settings as the Hamptons, New York; St. Barts, West Indies; and Saint-Tropez, France. In 2002 he began a series of paintings (the Krefeld Project) based on photographs he took of two performers enacting various scenarios within the Museum Haus Esters, a former private home designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Krefeld, Germany. Fischl continued to paint from photographs, often manipulating them in Photoshop to create disorienting or ambiguous scenes. Works of this kind include the series Beach Paintings (2006–10), Art Fair (2013–16), Complications from an Already Unfulfilled Life (2018–19), and My Old Neighborhood (2021).

In addition to art, Fischl led campaigns with his wife, artist April Gornik, to rehabilitate a number of buildings in Sag Harbor, New York, where they had lived for several decades. For example, the pair transformed a deconsecrated clapboard church into a community arts centre and artist residency (2021). Fischl released an autobiography, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, in 2013.