Nicole Eisenman’s delirious turn at 52 Walker is titled “STY,” as in where pigs are kept. The artist's new paintings and sculptures wallow in discomfort. The walls are padded with hairy taupe acoustic panels, giving the show a sense of isolation, like a crate or a studio or the titular pen, a dingier cube. Few artists today match Eisenman’s wild brand of topical expressionism, their way of addressing current events and the niche moves of painting as a discipline. The theme here is—what else?—the absurd necessity of art in times of crisis.
Eisenman makes history paintings of the present, wily canvases packed with painterly in-jokes and political invective. For “STY,” they convey an aura of Weimar-style abandon haunted by impending fascism. In Archangel (The Visitors) (2024), museum patrons mill around a forest of wiggly statues, apparently oblivious to the cartoonish hog in an Imperial German officer’s uniform looming over them like an evil parade float—a visitation from John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter’s Prussian Archangel sculpture, which was mounted on the ceiling of the 1920 Dada Fair in Berlin. The patrons include Joseph Goebbels (from a photo op at the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition in 1937), a pickpocket in the foreground resembling Eisenman, and others drawn from different stylistic folds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each figure is as nearsighted as the next, absorbed in what’s in front of them. Or maybe they’re just tired.
In a sense, to point out the Fascists in our midst is both too little and too much. It’s a symbol of liberal impotence that the F-word has lost its punch through the double imprecisions of overuse and reluctance, and anyway can’t always capture the bespoke authoritarianism of the moment. There are still lowercase fascists, though—or, to be precise, self-avowed neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists, neoreactionaries, monarchists, promoters of the unitary executive theory... So, Eisenman employs a little dramatic irony. We see the swine in proto-Gestapo gear. Or, do we? The painter put him there, an art-historical specter.
The willful blindness of the intelligentsia is a trope, but so is their self-satisfaction. Fiddle V. Burns (2024), punningly titled, is a cutaway view of a battlefield trench as a tank drives over it, while a painter at their canvas studies the treads. Other paintings in the show are more pyrotechnic, but this one—an unappealing upside-down rainbow of brown, ugly on purpose, the painterly equivalent of pig wrestling—is the most coy: the bottom-left corner of the canvas is left exposed, like a curtsey. Easy to mock the painter for fiddling while the world burns, except Eisenman is that painter, trapped in their own virtuosity, self-satirizing.
“STY” is sympathetic even when it’s arch. Standing around the gallery as if milling with the crowd are three vague, towering Übermenschen or Italo-fascist idols, humanoids made from a swirling plaster composite that can imitate marble but is here pigmented with the colors of broken LED screens (There I Was, 2025). Each statue totes a TV, carrying it like something else—a phone, a painting?—and the surfaces crackle with smartphone footage, making them nightmarish allegories for the outsized weight of digital “feeds.”
The cultural elite have porcine tendencies too, glutted on images, irritated by their powers of observation, and so on. If only clear eyes could prevent the pending slaughter. What separates Eisenman’s wit from cringy anti-Trump propaganda is its explicit self-innervation. The artist is embedded in their subject, they record their scene. One of Eisenman’s most revealing paintings (not on view) is The Abolitionists in the Park (2020–22), a harlequin tableau of young people clustered in a New York park, around the time of the pandemic or Black Lives Matter uprisings. Critics Tobi Haslett and Hannah Black sit in the center. It’s a painting of people seeing themselves living through history. “STY” likewise conveys the bitter flex of being tugged along by the flow of events but also feeling your strength.
Still, any smart artist will be circumspect about art’s power. Eisenman’s paintings won’t stop any tanks or change any minds, but they’re not trying to. Instead, they revel in a more resigned role: something for like minds to rally around. Those like minds may yet be born, and future historians may see work like Eisenman’s as proof that there were skeptics and subversives in these dark times, free in soul if not body.
