Nicole Eisenman and the Modernists. Köpfe, Küsse, Kämpfe Cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld/Aargauer Kunsthaus/Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles/Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Nicole Eisenman, born 1965 in France, lives in New York, and her work is captivating because of its fascination with the human condition, questions about interpersonal interaction, and the precise observation of processes of alienation in civilisation. In her drawings, paintings, and sculptures, the artist combines elements from pop cultural contexts (political satire, comics) with traditional art historical references to form a new unity. Köpfe, Küsse, Kämpfe (Heads, Kisses, Struggles) brings together works from all of Eisenman’s creative periods. Against the backdrop of her artistic practice, in which various stylistic and compositional elements of historical painting become visible alongside pop-cultural influences, the show and the book are combined with works of classical modernism from the collections of the cooperating museums. Through these selectively introduced historical works, the exhibition and the book, together with Eisenman’s oeuvre, open up a resonance space spanning a century in which social upheavals are presented in their urgency, but also with hope and confidence.

Bice Curiger, born in 1948, is a Swiss art scholar and curator. In 2011 she curated the Venice Biennale, from 1992 to 2013 she was curator at the Kunsthaus Zurich for contemporary art and in the same year was appointed Chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French state. Since the summer of 2013, she has been the artistic director of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles. In 2012, with Snoeck, she published the exhibition catalog for the Kunsthaus Zürich, ”Deftig Barock – von Cattelan bis Zurbarán. Manifestos of the Precariously Vital.“ Nicole Eisenman, born in France in 1965 and raised in Scarsdale, New York, is an American painter and sculptor. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and in her neorealist painting she has not only drawn on media culture, i.e. advertising, comics and TV, but rather has relentlessly borrowed genres from the last 100 years of painting and sculpture history. In the process, she developed a feminist one-woman insurgency that clearly finds itself alongside the LGBQT Pride movement. Since her first appearance in 1995 at the Whitney Biennial, she has used figuration to turn the political into the personal and vice versa. She paints narrative fantasies wrested from life. These not infrequently seem funny, even though they mostly neither are nor were meant to be. Her work was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 and at the Whitney Biennial the same year; in 2013 she received the Carnegie Prize. Daniel Koep was curator and vice director at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, he is now exhibition director at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Katharina Ammann, born in 1974, has been director of the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau since 2020. The museum has gained an international reputation, particularly for its extensive collection of modern art by Swiss artists. Christina Végh, born 1970 in Switzerland, studied art history at the University of Zurich and at the University of California in Santa Cruz. In 2005 she took over the Bonner Kunstverein and was awarded, among other things, with her work on “experimental art education for children and young people.” In 2015, she became the first woman 11th director of the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover, and since February 2020 she is now director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Together with Snoeck, she published a book on Monica Bonvicini in 2020.