Couples

Skarstedt is pleased to present the exhibition Eric Fischl: Couples, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s recent work. Four years after his first exhibition here, which inaugurated the Paris gallery, Eric Fischl returns with a series on the historical theme of couples - whether mythological, literary or cinematic – as well as the feelings that are intrinsically linked to relationships: fidelity, passion, and love, but also breakups, betrayal and solitude. Renowned for his depiction of the human figure, Eric Fischl’s naturalistic paintings captures moments of everyday life, featuring characters from the American middle class. Having been raised in the suburbs of Long Island, Fischl’s quasi-autobiographical works provide food for thought about American society, where image culture, sexuality and the troubles of couple relations are recurrent themes. Each painting is imbued with a tragic tranquillity, the characters belonging to a true “casting” of actors that the artist mobilises to tell an intimate story. The direction of his narratives guides the choice of protagonists he employs, taken from his own photographs, working, in a way, as a director. Roadsides, hotel rooms, suburbs, swimming pools: these are all cinematic settings that serve as backdrops for his works, where apparent stillness masks deeper psychological unease. Fischl’s characters rarely make eye contact—either with the viewer of the others in the composition— but are often driven by a desire to get closer to one another. The viewer becomes a witness to scenes populated by the unspoken, where an imminent incident risks triggering a rift or, alternatively, a healing complicity. The proximity of bodies juxtaposed to their emotional distance and nebulous dynamics are at the heart of Couples. The series presents duos - companions or strangers - suspended in moments of immobility, where narrative certainty is withheld and the viewer is left to navigate the emotional terrain between the figures. Since the 1980s, the artist has been constructing these pictorial episodes of great intensity from his memories and his own photographic montages. With lucidity, Eric Fischl reveals the other side of the American way of life, exploring the invisible flaws of intimacy, desire and the human condition in a tragicomic tone. In Fischl’s own words, “When something happens beyond what is expected, and whose very nature strips you of your armour, that’s the definition of tragedy. Ambiguity is then the only way to move towards understanding.” 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. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been held in institutions such as Dallas Contemporary in 2018 in Dallas, Texas; the Albertina in 2014 in Vienna, Austria; the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Malaga in 2010 in Malaga, Spain; the Kestnergesellschaft in 2007-2008 in Hannover; Germany, the Stadtkirche Darmstadt in 2006 in Darmstadt, Germany; and the Delaware Center of Contemporary Art in 2006 in Wilmington, DE. He has also participated in exhibitions in major institutions such as the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée Beaubourg in Paris, France; and the The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Fischl's work has been featured in over one thousand publications. Alongside his wife, the painter April Gornik, Eric Fischl is the co-founder of The Church in Sag Harbor, a nonprofit arts center that hosts a residency program, a rotating set of exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and a browsing library. Today, he lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY with his wife.

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2 av Matignon

Paris, NY