Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (Central Pane), Circa 1500.
Eric Fischl, photo by Lori Hawkinsz
Tickets
General Ticket: $10
Member Ticket: $5
Join ERIC FISCHL as he muses on three archetypes for emotional and aspirational conditions that all cultures ponder through art: Heaven, Hell, and the Garden. Speaking specifically about the visual arts of Western art history, Eric’s lecture will explore how shape, color, line, gesture, pattern, and scale — the language an artist chooses to express feelings, thoughts, dreams, etc. — can be further explored within the dimension of these three classic motifs. “The archetypes of Heaven, Hell, and the Garden are handy generalizations for the exploration of ways to look at individual works of art though, albeit a little silly,” Eric notes. Come explore works of art (in projection) and hear Eric’s musings and interpretations of a wonderful array of paintings and drawings from the past 700 or so years.
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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 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.
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. His suburban upbringing provided him with a backdrop of alcoholism and a culture obsessed with image over content. Subsequently, his early work became focused on provocative, yet truthful, issues deemed repugnant by polite society. There is a powerful underlying sexuality in his works, which often portray intimate moments that the viewer is helplessly made privy to and address the dark and disturbing undercurrents of mainstream American life. Fischl’s large, human-scale figures only emphasize the voyeuristic feeling of his images and imbue them with a psychological, almost dreamlike 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. His work is held in the collections of, and he has had exhibitions at, major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée Beaubourg in Paris, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Fischl’s work has been featured in over one thousand publications.