Nicole Eisenman: What Happened

Nicole Eisenman. What Happened at Museum Brandhorst surveys for the first time the entire spectrum of the artist’s work in painting, drawing, and sculpture, bringing together approximately 100 works dating from 1992 to the present. Nicole Eisenman’s work is consistently formally inventive and materially ambitious. She has been hugely important to generations of lesbian and queer viewers, and the deep humanism of her work engages all audiences. She confronts the most worrying political and economic crises of our time, holds out for new kinds of resistance and community, and almost always, she brings to her work her anarchic sense of humour.

The exhibition begins with Eisenman’s murals and drawing installations from the 1990s where lesbian social and sex life was central to her image-making. A group of self-portraits from around 2004 show Eisenman confronting the predicament of the out-of-favour painter. Her works from the late 2000s engaged with the social and economic crises of the period, just as her paintings of the 2010s confront the omnipresence of screens in our social lives. While the exhibition explores the connection of her work to its various contexts, it also pays tribute to her formal experimentation, for instance with a room of her reliefs, sculptures, and prints focusing on the motif of the head. The penultimate section of the exhibition features large vertical paintings in which Eisenman confronted the rise of right wing popularism under Trump, while also celebrating those who resisted this turn. The show also celebrates Eisenman’s extraordinary ambition in sculpture with the inclusion in Munich of her multi-part sculpture, Procession.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog documenting the full range of Eisenman’s work. Essays by curators Mark Godfrey and Monika Bayer-Wermuth survey developments in Eisenman’s work since the 1990s, while Chloe Wyma considers Eisenman’s recent engagements with national and institutional politics. Alongside are texts by artists, curators and writers, many of whom have collaborated with Eisenman and provide personal reflections on significant past projects or reflect on the lesbian and queer communities to which she has been so central. These contributors include Jadine Collingwood, Britta Peters, Ann Philbin, Helena Reckitt, Joe Scotland, A.L. Steiner and Nicola Tyson.

Curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey.

In cooperation with Whitechapel Gallery in London.

The exhibition is supported by 
PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.
Allianz, Partner of PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.

Media partners
ARTE
Monopol