Born in 1965 in Verdun, France, Nicole Eisenman grew up in Scarsdale, an affluent town in New York State, USA, and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1987.

The New York that Nicole Eisenman knew in the 1980s rapidly shaped and strengthened their attraction towards art and comics. In the work of artists such as Sigmar Polke and David Wojnarowicz, and in comics magazines such as RAW, Nicole Eisenman discovered the language they would later want to employ. “It was raw, punk”, the artist explains in an interview; “it reflected the street culture, an alternative reality to that of my town, which was pretty neat and tidy”. Black humour appealed to Nicole Eisenman even at this early date, undoubtedly owing to its power to inject distance and fluidity into the norms – particularly those of gender – and rigid order prevailing in our societies.

Nicole Eisenman is considered one of the most important American painters of their generation. Awarded the Carnegie Prize in 2013 and the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2015, in 2018 they were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.