CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/23/2014

Nicole Eisenman: Dear Nemesis

"Hard it is—even on this dignified retrospective occasion," Terry Castle writes in CAM St. Louis' dignified new Nicole Eisenman retrospective catalogue, "to blather on in the usual ponderous art-book fashion about the witty, perverse, and hugely generous art of Nicole Eisenman. Two decades into her swashbuckling career, Eisenman's antic worldview and scabrous comic candor continue to puncture critical pomposity, starting with one's own. Eisenman is a born debunker: an artist who combines exacting—at times stupendous—technical gifts that with a lampooning vision of life so uncensored, intelligent, and impervious to high seriousness she leaves pretentious would-be art-scribes at a loss. To borrow Gertrude Stein's amusing epithet for Ezra Pound, Eisenman can reduce even the most exasperating of Village Explainers to uncharacteristic silence." Untitled (2011-2012) is reproduced from Nicole Eisenman: Dear Nemesis.