New River Fine Art is honored to present the artwork of Eric Fischl, an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor.

His artwork is represented in many distinguished museums throughout the world and has been featured in over one thousand publications. His extraordinary achievements throughout his career have made him one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. He began his art education in Phoenix, Arizona where his parents had moved in 1967. He attended Phoenix College and earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts in 1972. He then spent some time in Chicago, where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1974, he moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to teach painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Fischl had his first solo show, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Nova Scotia in 1975 before relocating to New York City in 1978.

Eric Fischl’s sublimations on mylar with pins and digital pigment prints on paper give an artistic approach to the thesis of human portrayals. Fischl explores the psyche of interpretation- of how we see ourselves versus the image we portray to those around us. He emphasizes this in the stacked translucent layers of images. The artworks are interpreted narratives that focus on the characters in the story. Fischl creates images that are both striking in their saturated tones and infused with the subtle tension of figures twisting, reaching, and pushing out beyond the boundaries of the picture plane.

Beginning in 2011, Eric Fischl began creating a collection of work utilizing contemporary art-making materials to reimagine the collage process he began in the late 70s and early 80s. The artist first began developing this new body of work in layers of clear acrylic resin, with figures painted and/or printed onto clear acetates and then embedded within poured layers of cast resin. More recently, Fischl began experimenting with figures painted and/or printed onto loose mylars that are then pinned over a watercolor or oil painted background.

While both the cast resin pieces and pinned mylar concepts emanate from the same desire to reimagine his early collage process, each accomplishes very different results. The resin pieces were created around the time Fischl began exploring cast glass sculpture. The resin pieces became a way to create collaged images in modern materials that capture light in a similar way to the glass sculptures, whereby light comes into the piece and projects back out of the work. In the pinned mylars, Fischl wanted to break free from the confines of the cast resin and create images which extend beyond the image plane, like his early mylar pieces. This became a creative driver for much of this new body of work.

Ever-present is Fischl’s disconnection of the characters in a society that does not support the collective. There is a selfless pose that is contradicted by an external posture. Body language reads louder than the internal dialogue of the mind’s constant chatter of self. In the artwork, how we perceive our own actions might not adequately reflect the reality of a dominant disposition seen by others.

In Men in Water, Fischl’s almost-nude subjects bare large amounts of skin, leaving them vulnerable and unclothed with nothing to hide, frolicking in confidence, showing their core’s truth - an exposure deemed defenseless. In Man Woman and Boy, the ocean breeze flutters the blouse of the woman, while the boy off to the left of the composition is enjoying the innocence of a day at the beach. Their relations are unknown, and this duly creates plots and tales foretold only by the viewing audience, making elaborate connections when none might not exist. The audiences’ role connects the subjects in a visual approach while the artist’s physical layers of transparent mylar build physical levels to the storyline. We earnestly strive to connect and find relations with those around us, and Fischl gives us that ability.

In these pinned mylar works, Fischl creates images that are both striking in their saturated tones and infused with the subtle tension of figures twisting, reaching, and pushing out beyond the boundaries of the picture plane.

This work represents the latest in Fischl's creative process. Here the artist has reimagined his technique used to create glassine collages in the late 70s and early 80s. Drawing on those early years, Fischl pulls his collage process forward using contemporary imagery and art-making technology not available to him in prior years. The result is work that is fresh, arresting, and deeply tied to the historic roots of the artist.