Including just five major paintings and a 3-part sculpture group, Nicole Eisenman’s solo at 52 Walker is selective but powerful, presenting new work that comments on art world practice and a political climate hostile to artists. In one piece, an artist stands painting in a foxhole while a tank rolls by overhead; elsewhere, a painter in a beret has dropped enough paint on the studio floor and walls to create a bunker that isolates as much as it protects. The show’s largest work pictures an art opening crowded with generic abstract sculptures and young people, one of whom pickpockets a worshipful collector while a pig in a military uniform (echoing a sculpture at the 1920 Berlin Dada exhibition) hovers overhead. Here, a cartoonish man on the right bids on a painting of an auction scene while a mustachioed, beret-wearing artist on the left looks grimly on, a painting of a painting of a painting that questions the reality of anything we see in art market practice. (On view through Jan 10th in Tribeca).
