![]() There are ways that it brings us together in a shared experience where trauma or tragedy is present. It gives it voice it gives it a language. Let’s deal with it.”ĭB: So was there a similar motivation in your decision to make the 9/11 works?ĮF: I really felt that, given the trauma and tragedy of 9/11 as it was unfolding, artists would be needed. I paint people who are doing things, and sometimes they are doing things they shouldn’t be doing. It took me a while to get rid of the crap I had picked up in the general discussion of the art world, to let that go and just say, “No, I paint people. Why would you want to compete with that? But the process of transition to figuration was something that wasn’t ultimately a formalist choice it was content-driven. If you had to paint, it was much better to paint abstractly than to paint figuratively, because figurative work was thought to be the domain of photography and film. Can you relate this to the figurative work you made around 9/11, given that you’ve just discussed the more oblique, formal way that other artists approached the catastrophe?ĮF: My formative years in school, and then for several years after that, were a period of absorbing the prejudices towards painting and figuration. The shapes I’m working with feel more fragmented.”ĭB: In your memoir, Bad Boy, you talk about going to CalArts and your relationship with the conceptualist moment at the time-your struggle to figure out what was going to happen to your work if it wasn’t going to be conceptual or abstract. Then a lot of artists, over time, would talk about how they were almost embarrassed-“Oh my palette has changed. A lot of artists felt like they were suffering personally, but didn’t think their art had anything to do with that kind of experience, or that they had to change their art to deal with it. I came to find that a lot of artists felt it would be perceived as opportunistic. I really thought that more artists would jump right in and do it. The Rodin-esque work was controversial at the time, when Fischl was accused of insensitivity and narcissism for depicting, with high aestheticism, a figure who appeared to be falling to the ground, her body contorting at the moment of impact.įischl spoke with David Balzer on the evening of the lecture-also the evening before the 14th anniversary of 9/11-about the resonance of Tumbling Woman, humanism in contemporary art, recession and more.ĭavid Balzer: How has the Tumbling Woman work, which you made soon after 9/11, settled with you through the years? You were one of the first major American figures to make a creative piece in response to what was happening, and many people didn’t know how to feel about it-if it was right to make art, too soon, how to process, etc.Įric Fischl: I was surprised by that. The occasion was marked by the exhibition, at both the NGC and the residence of the US ambassador to Canada, of various versions of Fischl’s Tumbling Woman, a sculpture he first made in 2002 in response to the events of 9/11. ![]() ![]() ![]() The famed New York painter met his long-term partner April Gornik while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the 1970s, and has shown in and visited the country regularly ever since.įischl visited Ottawa a few weeks ago to give a talk at the National Gallery of Canada as part of Contemporary Conversations-the NGC series co-presented by the US Embassy Ottawa and the US Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies. Eric Fischl has an abiding diplomacy with Canada.
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