Nicole Eisenman: STY, at 52 Walker

Nicole Eisenman, installation view, courtesy of 52 Walker

By SOPHIE HOWE November 21st, 2025

Since moving from London back to New England, I've become disillusioned by the possibility of maintaining a connection to the commercial fine art world where everything moves quickly in a whirling microcosm. I’ve been trying to write responses to contemporary exhibitions as I did with my response to Nicole Eisenman’s show at Whitechapel Gallery in London. I no longer possess the same kind of easy access to major cosmopolitan gallery shows. I wonder what changes when the viewpoint of the reviewer is shifted? Can reviewing virtually perform the assumed function? 

My auto fictional response to Eisenman’s show What Happened was published by Whitechapel Gallery where the show took place in 2023/2024. Eisenman’s painted figures from Beer Garden with Ulrike and Celeste (2009), The Triumph of Poverty (2009) and Selfie (2014) became members of my family at Christmas, tangled up in considerations of global affairs that took place in the years that Eisenman created those paintings. Her subjects are harrowing, casual in their desperate states and despite their muddling anatomical impossibilities, immediately recognizable. Even when I had physical access, I still chose to respond based on my virtual experience. Through researching Eisenman, I found the contextual entry point that resonated. 

Beer Garden with Ulrike and Celeste, 2009. Oil on canvas. 165.1 × 208.3 cm. (L)

 Seder, 2010. Oil on canvas. 99 x 122 cm (R)

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, 11 October 2023 – 14 January 2024, installation view: Whitechapel Gallery, London. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths.

If you apply a theory of care in Emmanuel Lévinas’ style, you might argue that because I have not had a face-to-face interaction with the pieces in Eisenman’s show, I have not generated care. He writes: “The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no ‘interiority’ permits avoiding.” I did not look into the eyes of the paintings, but my connection to her work is a testament to Eisenman’s efficacy of communicating humanity. Even of a sickly-green man with a front-butt, even through the glow of a screen. 

When I examined her work through the Whitechapel website, I zoomed in and put my face very close to the screen. I could look as close as I wanted without setting off any alarms. The interface of the gallery’s website was effective in creating a blank space around the photographs of the paintings, forming a penetrable membrane where I could easily slide between the paintings like connective tissue. It allowed me to control the pace of digestion and my interpretation of the narrative. This experience was one of solitude, without the competitive, provocative, social performance of attending a show. There is no possibility to show face, to network, but instead one becomes absorbed by the glow of the screen.

Now on from October 30th to January 10th is Nicole Eisenman’s show, STY, at 52 Walker in New York. Alongside a collection of paintings is There I Was (2025), Scagliola and rock humanoid forms, whose figures have been manipulated to suit the needs of monitors playing videos. This is the first time Eisenman has worked with Scagliola, but the techno-human relation is reminiscent of her aptly named Death Disco (2010). If you’ve ever loved a DJ, truly loved and deified them, you might see yourself in the despairing amorphous blob of Munch-like Screamers huddled to the left of the precocious disc jockey. If you’ve ever been tethered to technology, you might see yourself in the slouch of the faceless sculptural group. This is Eisenman’s magic: her ability to translate the grasp that technology can have on human relations. This yearning is only heightened when experienced virtually.

Nicole Eisenman, installation view, courtesy of 52 Walker

In art school as a writer, I would present my short stories in formal critiques. Sometimes I would read aloud, or place the pages on the floor for readers to engage with at their own pace. It didn’t matter the mode of presentation, the feedback was always: “Why did you choose to print the pages on A4 paper?” What I hoped to receive was feedback on the content on an emotional and grammatical level, not a questioning of the materiality.  I was constantly met with reminders that I wasn’t in a writing workshop. I thought I was. I’d hoped for a hybrid, fluid exchange between “fine art” and a writing practice. I couldn’t understand how they were not one and the same. A perceived limitation of access being the way that written word was ingested by the reader rendered any non-visual, non-passive art form useless. I wish that I could inject a story directly into the consciousness of the audience, but a mediator must always be present in some capacity. The closest thing to a removal of a mediator is a liminal space. This focus on materiality is a misdirection away from concept, which falls under a similar category of an over-emphasis on the positionality of work in an exhibition space. 

In a dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson: ‘What is a Museum?’ Kaprow states “There was once an art which was conceived for the museums, and the fact that the museums look like mausolea may actually reveal to us the attitude we’ve had to art in the past. It was a form of paying respect to the dead.” Is reviewing a show you’ve only viewed online the contemporary art-world manifestation of live streaming funerals? Instead, the introduction of the virtual exhibition space allows for a place for art to have an after-life.

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, 11 October 2023 – 14 January 2024, installation view: Whitechapel Gallery, London. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths.

Smithson responds to Kaprow: “I think that the best thing you can say about museums is that they really are nullifying in regard to action. I’m interested for the most part in what’s not happening, that area between events which could be called the gap.” What is more empty and void-like than the internet? The step beyond the white cube is the website designer’s use of #FFFFFF. Smithson died before the age of the internet, but I am curious how he would engage with its nullity. To follow his mode of thought, the museum is a dead space, therefore the internet is a dead space, he is interested in this dead space. Kaprow and Smithson are suggesting that the museum is where work goes to die, but this forgettable, printer-paper like space can uplift the work itself in its nonexistence. Maybe Smithson is floating around on the electromagnetic waves, experiencing exhibitions via gallery websites. This virtual death actually breeds longevity, transforming cold solemnity into accessibility. When the ambience of a physical space is removed, only the work itself is left. The body, the outfit, the social connections of the viewer are non-existent. The viewer is everywhere and nowhere, giving back some of the purpose to the art.   

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened, 11 October 2023 – 14 January 2024, installation view: Whitechapel Gallery, London. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths.

There is capturing the methodology of the dynamic between the gallery and the artist, and then there is taking pictures and uploading them to the website. In this digital age, it is in the curator’s interest to replicate the show to its full extent virtually. This way, there is still the possibility to guide the eye of the viewer in a Temple Grandin style procession through the gallery. The traditional review is built toward how the work will be perceived by a potential buyer instead of being oriented towards the vision of the artist. When the curator’s voice is distilled through a transference, it reveals a non-commercial, dematerialised emphasis on the artist. This is not a catch-all act. The sublime cannot be replicated through a phone screen; you can’t become so small in the face of the old masters. When their paintings are uploaded online and digitized in ultra high resolution, the sense of proportion is lost. 

Understanding the museum as mausolea is a way of highlighting the dissonance between the art and the viewer. The confines of the established mode of silent obedience in a white cube space can be co-opted or reclaimed by viewing it online. If you, the reviewer, are floating in liminality, you don’t have to subscribe to the rules of the mausolea. Now with the introduction of the internet, that intersection becomes both more distant and more accessible. This spatial distance between the reviewer and the reviewed further connects the two figures. Perhaps it is a generative force, this techno-human collaboration, resulting in more observation, less hierarchy, more conversation, more ghosts. Look at Eisenman, no matter the lens. She will teach you something about your heart. WM

Endnotes 

What is a Museum?’ A dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson (1967), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996).

Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingus. Pittsburgh, Pa: Duquense University Press, 1961.