Biography

Eric Fischl
(Born 1948)

Eric Fischl was born in New York in 1948. He graduated from the California Institute of Arts in Valencia, in 1972, and was a teacher between 1974 and 1978 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Fischl works in multiple mediums such as painting, sculpture and prints, and is mostly known for his large scale, naturalistic images of middle-class American life. There is often a strong undercurrent of sexuality in his works, which sometimes portray intimate moments that the viewer is helplessly made privy of. Fischl’s large human-scale figures only emphasize the voyeuristic feeling of his images, and imbue them with a psychological, almost dream-like intensity. His earlier paintings are highly reminiscent of the Photorealism works of the 1960s, and during the 1980s his style expanded to fragmented images split into separate panels, which he used for paintings and etchings.

Eric Fischl has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been held in institutions such as the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover in 2007-2008, the Stadtkirche Darmstadt in Germany in 2006 and the Delaware Center of Contemporary Art in 2006. He has also participated in exhibitions in major institutions such as the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee Beaubourg in Paris and the The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Fischl’s work has been featured in over one thousand publications. Eric Fischl lives and works in Sag Harbor, New York.