Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35a, Munich
The vernissage of Nicole Eisenman: What Happened at Museum Brandhorst on 24 March 2023 was large and loud — packed, brightly lit, the energy of a major opening. Eisenman was present for the introduction, then gone.
The exhibition occupied the lower level, roughly chronological across three decades — George W. Bush, the 2008 financial collapse, Trump, Black Lives Matter, the omnipresence of screens, the climate catastrophe at the edge of the American landscape. Three narrative threads ran simultaneously: the queer personal, the sociopolitical, the formally experimental. The threads never collapse into a single argument — which is what keeps the work alive across three decades.
The first room announced itself immediately. Two large paintings occupied the walls. On the left, Tail End (2021): three figures in an amber landscape — a tall, pale walker holding a black cat at arm’s length, claws extended; an ochre figure slumped in a tilted chair; a smoker exhaling grey coils. All three in the same frame, none of them in contact. On the right, The Darkward Trail (2018): a surveillance drone, a man on a donkey, a figure in a balaclava holding a camera, the same desiccated terrain, the same ghostly elongated forms. Whatever wit operated in the earlier work is gone here. What remains is terrain and menace. Between and around them, Procession (2019): a group of disparate figures in bronze, plaster, urethane foam and found materials, lumbering forward together, collectively enormous, some pulling others, one on a rolling cart, pink chewing gum stretching between heels and floor. In a packed opening, Procession was the quietest thing in the room.
Further in, the paintings moved back to the beginning. Lemonade Stand (1994) — made during the American culture wars, when the NEA was prosecuting queer artists for obscenity and the AIDS crisis had made queer visibility a political battleground. Eisenman was painting for a downtown New York community under direct attack from the state. A ladder of women pees into jars in a relay to supply a drinks stall — the most American of childhood icons, the lemonade stand, turned filthy and communal and defiant. The image is absurd. The politics behind it were not.
Reality Show (2022) — part of the Brandhorst’s own collection — arrived later, quieter, more unnerving for it. A mouthless, drowsy-eyed cartoon figure in a half-collapsed house. The television dominates the foreground. So does the figure’s vacancy.
Stepping back out into the March chill, the question stayed with you. Not because the show failed to answer it. Because every section answered it differently, and all of them were right.
Artène attended the vernissage of Nicole Eisenman: What Happened , 24 March 2023.
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