Nicole Eisenman | Sadie Coles HQ
What other painter alive has Nicole Eisenman’s virtuosic skill and range of ambition? This new show at Sadie Coles includes metallic and kinetic sculptures as well as a dizzying variety of paintings.
Downstairs in the gallery, there are two grand canvases downstairs, huge skies full of stars - and drolly reflected by the meticulous recreation, in one of the works, of an old MacBook with the MacOS galaxy wallpaper on its minutely detailed screen.
Better still, upstairs, there’s The Orgy (pictured below). A sumptuous six panel work that’s a tangle of disembodied limbs and different painted textures - so different. Thrillingly compositionally coherent, Eisenman pulls focus in the bottom left hand corner with a burly fist, gripping the white sheets.
l-r ‘The Orgy’ (2026), ‘Togetherers’ (2026)
Finally, in the last room, a Philip Guston tribute featuring a clown car full of ICE and a monster emerging from its oily exhaust. Both themes in the first Eisenman show I saw, at Secession in Vienna in 2017.
While all these styles reference things I saw at Eisenman’s large big UK show, at Whitechapel Gallery in 2023, down to the oil painted Apple devices, the works on show represent a step forward. All of them were painted this year, by an artist now in her 60s. All of them breathtakingly vital. All so different.
The answer to the question I started the post with - for me at least - is nobody.
Nicole Eisenman is at Sadie Coles HQ (London). 23 September - 21 November 2026